Current Events > What are your thoughts on internet "scalpers"?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Trash human beings

One of my favorite things in the world is to watch them lose their ass.

A personal fav was this guy on facebook market place who went to every gamestop in town and bought dozens and dozens of copies of Cyberpunk for the PS4. At this super early window, it was a chore to find the game on PS4.

He listed a pic with his big ass stack of them and was trying to charge 75 bucks each, and naturally put tags in the description about how hard it was to find and GOTY and blah blah blah. I remember thinking "what an asshole scalper".

Flash to about 2 weeks later, when everyone knew the game was trash. He relisted the shit but cut the price to 65 bucks (still gotta make a profit). With a nice new pic of the stack that looked to be the exact same size.

2 weeks after that. priced down to 60, then 55, then 50 and so on until it bottomed at 40 with only a couple of copies sold.

I was wondering why he didnt just return them, until he uploaded a nice new pic of the pile that showed that every single one was opened (the entire time probably). Did the game come with some kind of DLC code or something? I know these losers love to open the games and try to sell those on the side.

In the end, fuck that guy. I hope he lost hundreds he invested trying to "make a hustle", and had to resort to selling them to gamestop for pennies on the dollar.

Wonder why he put them on Facebook instead of ebay. Sure there are fees but there are also millions of foo...buyers who will pay anything to get what they want right away. People on facebook are usually local and cheap.

This may sound harsh but it's a market correction. If a store gets 30 units of a new game system selling at $500 each and scalpers buy them up and are able to resell all of them for $1000 each, that means the market price for that game system is $1000. The store and/or console maker underpriced it.

This may sound harsh but it's a market correction. If a store gets 30 units of a new game system selling at $500 each and scalpers buy them up and are able to resell all of them for $1000 each, that means the market price for that game system is $1000. The store and/or console maker underpriced it.

This is an observation of the market but it's not a moral or ethical answer to the question of scalpers. Wealthy Cartel Kings are also a correction of the narcotics market but it's not a particularly interesting answer to the question.

That's fair. If we're talking exclusively about luxury items (which all the examples brought up in this topic are) then I see it as doing minor harm, and less harm than what any effort to prevent scalpers would do.

Do you have any opinion on the matter?

Their are different tiers of it. Remember at the height of covid some teenager claimed to make over $6 million scalping shit like toilet paper and other necessities? That kind of scalping should be criminal, but he made it on the news with a big smile on his face.

A couple of Taylor Swifts tickets sold and you potentially have a yearly salary. My wife tried getting some of the cheapest seats for 110 with no success. Minutes later they were being sold at 1.2k. Between that and scalping every limited edition thing there is, just fuck em.

I used to do it as a side thing. Learned how to use checkout bots and it got addicting. I learned every drop time pattern for major retailers and tried to snatch all the PS5s I could. I managed to buy around 300 PS5s during the height of it and made around 75k profit total which paid off all my debt and will be putting my kid to college.

But once consoles dipped in profitability, it's just not worth it. I felt stressed all the time cause it isn't easy and felt like a full time job to keep up with everything.

It's a fucked up practice and retailers should prevent it.

Oh trust me, retailers put in a ton of effort. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth. Bot devs will figure out an exploit around their security sometimes in the middle of a release and get their users to bypass and checkout instantly.

One of my favorite things in the world is to watch them lose their ass.

I used to do it as a side thing. Learned how to use checkout bots and it got addicting. I learned every drop time pattern for major retailers and tried to snatch all the PS5s I could. I managed to buy around 300 PS5s during the height of it and made around 75k profit total which paid off all my debt and will be putting my kid to college.

But once consoles dipped in profitability, it's just not worth it. I felt stressed all the time cause it isn't easy and felt like a full time job to keep up with everything.

Scalpers suck.

It's a fucked up practice and retailers should prevent it.