“Price gouging is a clear violation of our policies, unethical, and in some areas, illegal,” Amazon said in a statement. “In addition to terminating these third party accounts, we welcome the opportunity to work directly with states attorneys general to prosecute bad actors.”
Price gouging sellers sit on stockpiles of much needed supplies after they cleaned out all the inventory in many local areas so they could jack up prices up to 20x their retail cost. Screwing up the supply chain in many towns, while claiming to be doing a 'public' service.
You miss the point, did he buy up all of what was being advised as a necessary product to protect people's health during a pandemic situation and then price gouge by raising the price 4x over? Apples and oranges.
That couple went EVERY morning and bought ALL the inventory of those Lysol wipes from 3 or 4 Costco stores for a few weeks, $70,000 worth. That's bullshit and they deserve to be called out as scum. Because of people like them, there are NO disinfecting agent products of ANY kind, to be found in ANY of FIVE different stores I've looked. I don't live in Canada, so yes that type of behavior is happening all over, it causes regular people to overstock as well, setting off a chain reaction of shortages. Those two TacoKanuks just happened to get their names in the paper.
So why aren’t you screaming about how Costco did the same thing, but two orders of magnitude greater? Why aren’t you whining about buying wipes directly from the Lysol corporation?
Oh, because you’re just repeating the jewish narrative that the economy MUST be planned and CANNOT be allowed to operate without jewish influence. I see.
You see jack shit. Costco didn't price gouge the price 6x over. If anything you're the jewish hack promoting price gouging at the expense of public safety advisement.
Who says, shlomo? You? Why do YOU get to dictate the price? Why are YOU god? You’re meaningless. You’re worthless. You’re nothing. I, on the other hand, say they’re price gouging. I am god. They have to obey me.
See how that works? Now shut the fuck up.
If anything you're the jewish hack
OYYYYYYYYYYY VEYYYYYYYYYYYYY
YOU’RE A JEW BECAUSE YOU DENOUNCED MY JEWISH ECONOMIC CENTRAL PLANNING
Holy FUCK, you’re brain damaged. Just go back to reddit.
You may want to turn down your hearing aid during your spergeristic fit, wipe the spittle off your face and double check your diaper. Call your nurse if you can't manage that on your own. kek
Here's another one of your jewthink price gouging heros: "Colvin said he was simply fixing “inefficiencies in the marketplace.” http://archive.is/JN06s
Market supply chain fucked because of assholes who think like you.
The angry response from people who don't like his practices is also capitalism. The ability to punish a merchant when they get out of line is an important part of the system and the one most forgotten.
The problem is context of a imminent pandemic situation, where what he's depriving the locals from getting is something they need in order to have the best practices to stay well and not spread the virus if they have it (and to prevent others from spreading it, by cleaning surfaces). Price gauging in that situation is wrong. May he choke on his own vomit and have no one to wipe his face clean.
Price gouging is exactly what should be happening, by the company selling the items. This tells a free market to pour in more resources toward that item in that area. That way, even if expensive, everyone gets that item.
Unfortunately we don't have a free market, hence the shortages.
One of the links didn't work, but suffice it to say that the comparison of the hurricane situation is not equal to this pandemic situation.
Did they raise the price of generators 20 fold? /s It's different than a situation where the spread of a highly contagious virus is the reason for needing certain products.
What constitutes 'normal' supply and demand during a pandemic?
When thousands of people clear out all the stock from every local store within a 100 mile radius THEY create a demand that would not have been there to that degree had normal purchase habits with cognizant store owners helping curb hoarding tendencies, to slow the effect of damaging the supply chain, because EVERYONE was advised to use products like the ones cleaned out, which caused a panic buying situation. The online greedy fuckers helped cause panic buying and hoarding behavior, leaving highest risk populations like elderly people less likely if not impossible to get the products that they need the most, or the people who are taking care of the elderly family members.
Now we have people like this https://news.yahoo.com/17-700-bottles-hand-sanitizer-155735689.html sitting on stockpiles contemplating 'selling local' because their price gouging spree was cut off. That's almost 18,000 bottles of hand sanitizer that could be helping people from all the areas they raided because of greed (did they have to buy it ALL with no regard for the local population?). People like that want to justify buying from 'remote' areas (where they rudely assume the people don't need it) and some then go on to justify raising the price as high as they can to serve people 'in remote areas' where people can't find the product because other assholes probably cleared all the stock!
The law comes into play after a state of emergency is declared.
There is room to account for preventing the seller from operating at a loss: "If the seller can prove that the increased price is directly attributable to increases in the cost of labor or materials needed to provide the good or service, the seller may not be liable under the statute."
The statute applies to the following major necessities: lodging (including permanent or temporary rental housing, hotels, motels, and mobilehomes); food and drink (including food and drink for animals); emergency supplies such as water, flashlights, radios, batteries, candles, blankets, soaps, diapers, temporary shelters, tape, toiletries, plywood, nails, and hammers; and medical supplies such as prescription and nonprescription medications, bandages, gauze, isopropyl alcohol, and antibacterial products.
It also applies to other goods and services including: home heating oil; building materials, including lumber, construction tools, and windows; transportation; freight; storage services; gasoline and other motor fuels; and repair and reconstruction services.
The demand was created in part by the same people crying that they can't sell for what they want to and that one vendor has thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer in his garage, that is now out of normal market circulation while people go without. That's his fault and to the extent people get each other sick in the areas he stripped of normal retail inventory, because they didn't have what they needed to prevent the passing of infections, that's on him.
In this particular context you won't convince me, but in other situations (where the supply chain problem is not created to such a great degree by the opportunistic vendors) then of course profit motives can bring products to people. Just because we have capitalism doesn't mean there aren't times when consumers should be protected, it happens all the time in different ways. Car lemon laws, full disclosure on existing conditions when buying a house, health standards in restaurants/food vendors, labels on food items, warnings on packaging, all of which affect prices to some degree or another.
Car lemon laws, full disclosure on existing conditions when buying a house, health standards in restaurants/food vendors, labels on food items, warnings on packaging, all of which affect prices to some degree or another.
All of which could be handled by paid agencies instead of the government using force by law to enact.
Yes, they should have put up limits. Strip his ass of his membership card for a year while they're at it (which they won't since he dropped $70,000 there).
He's not "depriving locals," of their Lysol wipes; any local is free to go online and buy a pack from him. In fact, he's distributing Lysol to a wider market - maybe even benefiting people in remote locations.
Let's talk about the poor citizenship of the journalism huckster who doxxed this guy and exposed his family to death threats.
It's retailers fault for not having more in stock. It shouldn't be possible for a family to corner the market on a product by loading up the back of their f-150. He's an idiot anyway, he'll never unload those stupid things because there's a thousand different products that can be used to disinfect things.
The whole rush to buy disinfectant and masks and gloves is soo fucking stupid. One cough or sneeze on your tomatoes in the supermarket and you are fucked. One sneeze in the office. One touch on a doorknob or a handrail or a steering wheel. Are people going to try to disinfect everything? Because it's futile.
A supplier is only going to create as much product as they predict the market will demand. These predictions are often made months in advance. It must be the case because the global supply chain that feeds a factory often take months to get all required materials to the factory.
A retailer can't just snap it's fingers and have an F-150 worth of product for each horder that comes knocking. There's a limited supply based on a projected demand. A black swan event, like Corona-chan can't be reliably predicted and if the supplier decided to go into overdrive now, the product won't reach shelves for months. The whole Corona panic will be over by then. So, if Costco does a mass purchase now, there won't be any demand for that purchase by the time they receive it.
How much in stock? They were driving away with pallets.
One six-pack of wipes goes for about $20 at Costco, but fetches upward of $80 online, they said. Ranga told Quan they'd spent about $70,000 in bulk buys, and raked in about $100,000 in sales.
I'm all for capitalism but disaster gouging is peak scumbag.
^this
So consider this behavior when the risks are even higher for getting severely ill. Now everyone will be a hoarder or a prepper, because we can't count on people to not jack all the available products that are needed by people who can't get them in a timely manner, before all the shelves are empty. Maybe stores will be more aware of the need to put limits as to how many purchases per household should be allowed in a day.
The circumstances that allowed an individual to engage in some entrepreneurial capitalism is because other megacorporations failed to do their jobs. If Amazon had called Costco and worked out a deal to buy a a hundred thousand packages at $21 each, sent their semis around to pick it up, then resold them on amazon.com for $25 each, nobody would have even noticed and nobody would have called it price gouging. Instead the megacorps did nothing to recognize and attempt to fulfill the unmet consumer demand which created a gap for individuals to spend their own (relatively)small amounts of money, their time, and their own pickup to try and fulfill that demand on a small scale.
It's not even like it's an essential product, he's not selling them anything they must have.
Vancouver pair tells the Star they've made $30K selling cleaning products on Amazon during COVID-19 pandemic
Douglas Quan was at a Costco in Vancouver this week when he saw something that made him stop in his tracks.
Quan, a reporter with the Toronto Star's B.C. bureau, was there on Wednesday to cover the phenomenon of "panic buying" during the coronavirus pandemic.
"But before I even got to the front entrance, I stumbled across this couple who were loading up the back of their Ford pick-up truck with these stacks and stacks of Lysol disinfecting wipes," Quan told As It Happens guest host Duncan McCue.
"Naturally that piqued my curiosity, and so I approached them and started chatting with them." Quan reported the story in Thursday's Toronto Star.
The couple have identified themselves as Manny Ranga and Violeta Perez, and told Quan were there to buy Lysol wipes in bulk and re-sell them on Amazon for inflated prices.
Amazon has since suspended the couple's account.
'Not a bad profit at the end of the day'
The pair explained to Quan how they hit several Costco locations every day in Vancouver, Richmond and Burnaby, buy up all the Lysol wipes and cleaning liquid on hand, then turn them around for re-sale on their Amazon store Violeta & Sons Trading Ltd.
Quan says they had what appeared to be hundreds of cases stacked up on Costco pallets — enough that Ranga had to take two trips to get them all home.
kestrel9 ago
https://news.yahoo.com/17-700-bottles-hand-sanitizer-155735689.html
Price gouging sellers sit on stockpiles of much needed supplies after they cleaned out all the inventory in many local areas so they could jack up prices up to 20x their retail cost. Screwing up the supply chain in many towns, while claiming to be doing a 'public' service.
Tallest_Skil ago
“OY VEY, GOYIM, UNREGULATED COMMERCE?! WE CAN’T HAVE THAT!”
gosso920 ago
Isn't that how Jeff Bezos got his start, buying books in bulk to resell for profit?
kestrel9 ago
You miss the point, did he buy up all of what was being advised as a necessary product to protect people's health during a pandemic situation and then price gouge by raising the price 4x over? Apples and oranges.
ardvarcus ago
There are a metric TON of people profiting from the virus hysteria all around the globe.
kestrel9 ago
That couple went EVERY morning and bought ALL the inventory of those Lysol wipes from 3 or 4 Costco stores for a few weeks, $70,000 worth. That's bullshit and they deserve to be called out as scum. Because of people like them, there are NO disinfecting agent products of ANY kind, to be found in ANY of FIVE different stores I've looked. I don't live in Canada, so yes that type of behavior is happening all over, it causes regular people to overstock as well, setting off a chain reaction of shortages. Those two TacoKanuks just happened to get their names in the paper.
Tallest_Skil ago
So why aren’t you screaming about how Costco did the same thing, but two orders of magnitude greater? Why aren’t you whining about buying wipes directly from the Lysol corporation?
Oh, because you’re just repeating the jewish narrative that the economy MUST be planned and CANNOT be allowed to operate without jewish influence. I see.
kestrel9 ago
You see jack shit. Costco didn't price gouge the price 6x over. If anything you're the jewish hack promoting price gouging at the expense of public safety advisement.
Tallest_Skil ago
lol, you didn’t answer the question
Who says, shlomo? You? Why do YOU get to dictate the price? Why are YOU god? You’re meaningless. You’re worthless. You’re nothing. I, on the other hand, say they’re price gouging. I am god. They have to obey me.
See how that works? Now shut the fuck up.
Holy FUCK, you’re brain damaged. Just go back to reddit.
hahahahahahahhAHHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
kestrel9 ago
You're one of the lamest goats on voat. Settle down Ben-grandpapoWitz.
Tallest_Skil ago
hahhahahahahahahahahhAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHHAHA
kestrel9 ago
You may want to turn down your hearing aid during your spergeristic fit, wipe the spittle off your face and double check your diaper. Call your nurse if you can't manage that on your own. kek
Tallest_Skil ago
hahhahahahahahahahahhAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHHAHA
kestrel9 ago
Here's another one of your jewthink price gouging heros: "Colvin said he was simply fixing “inefficiencies in the marketplace.” http://archive.is/JN06s
Market supply chain fucked because of assholes who think like you.
HistoryQuest ago
Resellers don't bother me. Gouging desperate people during a crisis does. Mexicans have zero sense of ethics or morals.
kestrel9 ago
My sentiment exactly ^^
Zed_Leppelin ago
Niggernomics 101. Using the principles learned from decades of food stamp fraud.
ReAwakened ago
I don't see any problem with this even if he is a beaner. He's taking the risk, he's getting the profit. It's straight up capitalism 101.
Gringojones ago
The angry response from people who don't like his practices is also capitalism. The ability to punish a merchant when they get out of line is an important part of the system and the one most forgotten.
kestrel9 ago
The problem is context of a imminent pandemic situation, where what he's depriving the locals from getting is something they need in order to have the best practices to stay well and not spread the virus if they have it (and to prevent others from spreading it, by cleaning surfaces). Price gauging in that situation is wrong. May he choke on his own vomit and have no one to wipe his face clean.
Plavonica ago
No. NO! Bad! Bad dog!
Price gouging is exactly what should be happening, by the company selling the items. This tells a free market to pour in more resources toward that item in that area. That way, even if expensive, everyone gets that item.
Unfortunately we don't have a free market, hence the shortages.
kestrel9 ago
I refer to @Master_Foo's comment on the supply chain topic.
Plavonica ago
And I refer to @oar's comment on price gouging. Specifically the video he links is about price gouging in a crisis event.
kestrel9 ago
One of the links didn't work, but suffice it to say that the comparison of the hurricane situation is not equal to this pandemic situation.
Did they raise the price of generators 20 fold? /s It's different than a situation where the spread of a highly contagious virus is the reason for needing certain products.
What constitutes 'normal' supply and demand during a pandemic?
When thousands of people clear out all the stock from every local store within a 100 mile radius THEY create a demand that would not have been there to that degree had normal purchase habits with cognizant store owners helping curb hoarding tendencies, to slow the effect of damaging the supply chain, because EVERYONE was advised to use products like the ones cleaned out, which caused a panic buying situation. The online greedy fuckers helped cause panic buying and hoarding behavior, leaving highest risk populations like elderly people less likely if not impossible to get the products that they need the most, or the people who are taking care of the elderly family members.
Now we have people like this https://news.yahoo.com/17-700-bottles-hand-sanitizer-155735689.html sitting on stockpiles contemplating 'selling local' because their price gouging spree was cut off. That's almost 18,000 bottles of hand sanitizer that could be helping people from all the areas they raided because of greed (did they have to buy it ALL with no regard for the local population?). People like that want to justify buying from 'remote' areas (where they rudely assume the people don't need it) and some then go on to justify raising the price as high as they can to serve people 'in remote areas' where people can't find the product because other assholes probably cleared all the stock!
California also has price gouging laws https://www.oag.ca.gov/consumers/pricegougingduringdisasters
The law comes into play after a state of emergency is declared.
There is room to account for preventing the seller from operating at a loss: "If the seller can prove that the increased price is directly attributable to increases in the cost of labor or materials needed to provide the good or service, the seller may not be liable under the statute."
The demand was created in part by the same people crying that they can't sell for what they want to and that one vendor has thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer in his garage, that is now out of normal market circulation while people go without. That's his fault and to the extent people get each other sick in the areas he stripped of normal retail inventory, because they didn't have what they needed to prevent the passing of infections, that's on him.
https://www.oag.ca.gov/consumers/pricegougingduringdisasters
Plavonica ago
*shrug
I'll not convince you. But others may recognize that this is why we can't have a truly free market.
kestrel9 ago
In this particular context you won't convince me, but in other situations (where the supply chain problem is not created to such a great degree by the opportunistic vendors) then of course profit motives can bring products to people. Just because we have capitalism doesn't mean there aren't times when consumers should be protected, it happens all the time in different ways. Car lemon laws, full disclosure on existing conditions when buying a house, health standards in restaurants/food vendors, labels on food items, warnings on packaging, all of which affect prices to some degree or another.
Plavonica ago
All of which could be handled by paid agencies instead of the government using force by law to enact.
kestrel9 ago
True, not against that. Government is a royal pain much of the time and they tend to waste a lot of money (not to mention people's time) imho
SpiderSpawnX ago
Costco is a wholesale Club, it's up to them to put limits. Otherwise it's fair.
kestrel9 ago
Yes, they should have put up limits. Strip his ass of his membership card for a year while they're at it (which they won't since he dropped $70,000 there).
Tallest_Skil ago
Just fuck yourself, commie.
kestrel9 ago
Why do communists have bread line situations? One reason is because of supply chain issues jackass. You're the one with the kikekommie mentality.
Tallest_Skil ago
So… the COMPANY should punish A CUSTOMER for something the COMPANY did wrong. This is your “solution” to the situation.
Run. along. now.
Guy_Justsome ago
He's not "depriving locals," of their Lysol wipes; any local is free to go online and buy a pack from him. In fact, he's distributing Lysol to a wider market - maybe even benefiting people in remote locations.
Let's talk about the poor citizenship of the journalism huckster who doxxed this guy and exposed his family to death threats.
kestrel9 ago
He's still a scumbag. Karma's a bitch so eventually what he did will catch up to him.
WORF_MOTORBOATS_TROI ago
It's retailers fault for not having more in stock. It shouldn't be possible for a family to corner the market on a product by loading up the back of their f-150. He's an idiot anyway, he'll never unload those stupid things because there's a thousand different products that can be used to disinfect things.
ardvarcus ago
The whole rush to buy disinfectant and masks and gloves is soo fucking stupid. One cough or sneeze on your tomatoes in the supermarket and you are fucked. One sneeze in the office. One touch on a doorknob or a handrail or a steering wheel. Are people going to try to disinfect everything? Because it's futile.
Master_Foo ago
A supplier is only going to create as much product as they predict the market will demand. These predictions are often made months in advance. It must be the case because the global supply chain that feeds a factory often take months to get all required materials to the factory.
A retailer can't just snap it's fingers and have an F-150 worth of product for each horder that comes knocking. There's a limited supply based on a projected demand. A black swan event, like Corona-chan can't be reliably predicted and if the supplier decided to go into overdrive now, the product won't reach shelves for months. The whole Corona panic will be over by then. So, if Costco does a mass purchase now, there won't be any demand for that purchase by the time they receive it.
kestrel9 ago
Thank you Master_Foo, well said.
fuckinghell ago
I think people are just stupid and they were capitalizing on that.
kestrel9 ago
How much in stock? They were driving away with pallets.
WORF_MOTORBOATS_TROI ago
It sounds like Costco should start selling on Amazon then.
HistoryQuest ago
Meh. People are paying desperate prices. Won't last.
I'm all for capitalism but disaster gouging is peak scumbag.
kestrel9 ago
^this
So consider this behavior when the risks are even higher for getting severely ill. Now everyone will be a hoarder or a prepper, because we can't count on people to not jack all the available products that are needed by people who can't get them in a timely manner, before all the shelves are empty. Maybe stores will be more aware of the need to put limits as to how many purchases per household should be allowed in a day.
WORF_MOTORBOATS_TROI ago
The circumstances that allowed an individual to engage in some entrepreneurial capitalism is because other megacorporations failed to do their jobs. If Amazon had called Costco and worked out a deal to buy a a hundred thousand packages at $21 each, sent their semis around to pick it up, then resold them on amazon.com for $25 each, nobody would have even noticed and nobody would have called it price gouging. Instead the megacorps did nothing to recognize and attempt to fulfill the unmet consumer demand which created a gap for individuals to spend their own (relatively)small amounts of money, their time, and their own pickup to try and fulfill that demand on a small scale.
It's not even like it's an essential product, he's not selling them anything they must have.
kestrel9 ago
Scumbags