I get this meme is about scalpers, but the description also applies to logistic chains and stores, our world as we know it literally couldn’t function without those. Not to say I’m for capitalism per se, but logistics make the world go round (as flawed as that world may be).
To expand a little bit on your comment: The reason that scalpers =/= retail is that initial retail sellers are at the end of the wholesale supply chain, which is the huge logistical market we rely on. Retail scalpers create an uneeded secondary supply chain that’s even more exclusive than wholesale. This wasn’t nearly the issue it is today until scalpers learned how to code.
Now businesses have no incentive to mitigate the supply issues scalpers introduce because they get a whole host of benefits (guaranteed rapid ROI, simplified logistics or dispatch, reliable product cycles). It’s a big part of why you see so many brands going to small ‘limited edition’ drops/releases lately. Being able to reliably produce known quantities of product that you can be sure of selling 100% reduces depreciation, improves your attractiveness to your vendors and shortens your manufacturing chain.
You can get a single shipment that contains all the materials needed for a given run, without having to source reliable long-term suppliers. Plus if you cant find a certain material at that moment, you can re-tool for what you can find easily (smaller production = smaller production lines = fewer machines) with much less initial outlay. Keeping several designs being prepared at once also means you’re much more flexible to supply issues / machine downtime / etc.
There’s a ton more perks, as well, but you get the idea.
The tradeoff is that your setup costs are higher and more frequently incurred, but thats pretty easy to mitigate down to near triviality with good management. Also that it’s very tricky to get into this position, and if you’re relying on FOMO an unpopular product release can take years to finally move all the units.
So what I’m saying is scalpers suck massively and we’d better get used to them because nobody wants to get rid of them except consumers, and fuck consumers amirite c-suite lads?
Thank you for the detailed explanation. I found it both informative and unsettling!
There’s a difference between logistics and some cunt buying out all the toilet paper at wal-mart so they can sell it on Craigslist.
Globalization wouldn’t be as attractive if man in the middle incentive didn’t factor into cost of goods sold. Vertical integration (take apple for example) can address that, but it introduced other problems. And globalization as a whole is mostly a good thing.
LOL, and nobody’s complaining about the weed man doing this.
Uhhh…yeah, they are…
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Where does exactly sits the line where a person can own and manage what is theirs to somehow try to make a better living?
I’d say the line gets drawn between landlords that do physical labor to maintain their properties and landlords that outsource the whole process to someone else.
In the first case, the tenant is paying for real labor. Landlords that handle their own drywall and plumbing. Landlords that mow their own lawns and fix their own appliances. Handymen that own a property or two and maintain them as part of their trade. These landlords exist, but they are few and far between. I mostly see them at Airbnb properties and small family-run motels. But even that is going by the wayside, as investment clubs and lending groups either buy them out or run them out of business.
In the second case, the tenant is effectively just paying a vig to the landlord in order to access the landlord’s low-interest line of credit. These landlords are fucking everywhere. All your big corporate offices - your Amli’s and Lincoln Properties and Pinnacles - effectively operate this way. They’ve got legions of (routinely underpaid) staff and subcontractors who actually do the work of maintaining the properties. They kick back sizable chunks of their revenue as administrative overhead and - in the case of publicly traded firms - dividends and stock buybacks. Only a fraction of the rental income goes towards the actual acquisition and maintenance of the property itself and the properties are regularly leveraged out for more new borrowing power used to gobble up more open real estate to add to the cartels’ portfolios.
The second group also tends to get significant tax incentives, subsidized loans, and other forms of funny money, allowing them to operate for short periods of time at a loss in order to squelch independent competitors.
The real line is ultimately the ROI on the property. If you’re earning a standard workman’s salary off maintaining a second unit, I doubt anyone will seriously bat an eye at your habits. By contrast, if you have title on a dozen different multi-million dollar multi-family units and you’re clearing double-digit annualized returns in what amounts to a part time side-hustle, that’s a pretty clear indication of price gouging behavior.
But because price gouging in the real estate market is so routine (to the point that “buy a home” is common wisdom, entirely because its the only consistent way to escape predatory rental practices) we’ve stopped acknowledging this method of usury as anything but normal.
I’m starting my own small computer store. I’m not a pro, just an enthusiast fed up with horrendous prices for low quality hardware and nearly no choice of brands.
This is going to be just an hobby store but I would like to see some return for my time invested.
If I see you at Best Buy, trying to clear the shelf of the latest widget so you can upsell it at your boutique venue for 3x the sticker price, I’m still going to believe you’re going straight to extra hell.
If I see you on Temu or Aliexpress, picking up specialty hardware in bulk and then undercutting Best Buy right next door, I’ll put a word in with St. Peter when you get to the Pearly Gates.
Well, I’m an atheist so, for me, its either lights out or hell, if the other side is in any way correct.
I jumped right unto importing. Small scale, mostly consumables at the moment: thumb drives, SSDs, cables, mice, the likes.
I test before I sell; if it fails me, it’s not worthy to market to customers: better a returning customer giving me hell to get the best deal out of me than an one time sale and a lasting bad reputation.
Only thing I have to buy localy it’s keyboards; we’re a small market and it’s hard to get our layout in small quantities.
Just out of curiosity, who is your supplier? Is there some middle-market wholesaler for this kind of stuff or do you just order it online from a bulk retailer?
Online.
For my market, during the pandemic, prices were simply leveled. Importing or buying on local wholeselers was the same.
Currently I can get up to 50% lower prices if I import. And if I go bulk, on some items it gets ridiculous.
Good luck with that. But there’s practically no money in hardware. We sell things, and our suppliers can’t get it to us in bulk for the same price you can pick it up on Amazon. Our customers are technophobes who only buy from us so they can ring us up when they can’t plug it in.
Custom software and services are the only places we make money.
Thank you for the warning.
Brick and mortar is rapidly dying… Especially for computer hardware. Look at circuit City, radio shack, best buy… They’re either dying or dead. Make sure your market research is really solid!
Isn’t that literally everything you buy? Nobody sells at cost price and stays in business. Supermarkets, even. Just everything.
This is about scalpers. (Which includes Ticketmaster.)
During the height of the pandemic many scalpers were claiming that they were a crucial part of capitalism. That what they were doing was important for the economy.
I agree with you, I’m sending a subtle nod to the fact that, that line of distinction is becoming so thin it’s almost invisible.
That’s fine, but the comic doesn’t make that distinction anywhere. Buying in bulk and reselling higher is what every store in existence does.
It’s supposed to be easily inferred which honestly it is.
There is a subtle, but fundamental, difference between being a distributor - someone who buys in bulk at Location X and sells retail at Location Y - and a monopoly/cartel - an individual or group that takes control of a critical point in the supply chain and then operates as a monopoly reseller at enormous mark-ups to everyone downstream.
The general distinction is in the degree of markup that your position provides. For inelastic goods/services (staple foods/energy/medical/emergency services) and opportunity-limited services (concert tickets/first-edition prints and collectibles) you can capitalize in a sudden spike in demand to raise prices astronomically.
No better example of this than the Texas electricity grid. Natural Gas power providers run a cartel in our state which allows them to limit how much electricity they generate during periods of peak usage. So when the weather starts cresting 100° and electric demand for A/C peaks, they can charge upwards of $3000/Mwh for electricity that was trading at $15-20/Mwh hours earlier.
You seem to be furthering my original point. Here where I am it’s our supermarkets, they just got awarded the shonky from choice, for price gouging. That line is blurred. There almost is no line. When we can just see how much one marks it up, we get all up in arms, all the others the original price they pay is hidden, so we don’t feel as put out, but it’s not as fair a system, in those hidden places, as we imagine, as you see and point out occurs in your power grid.
Dear ‘capitalists’ who keep using this excuse to defend what they do: Distribution is different from scalping. One has legitimate costs for what you suggested to keep a brick and mortar business running. The other is fleecing without cost and it’s not exactly for the altruistic reason of ‘just surviving’ nor is it interested in anyone else’s ability to survive. It is the unchecked reason why the planet is in the hole now.
I think this isn’t any kind of defense of capitalism. He’s just saying that meme isn’t specific enough about it being about scalping. “Distribution” also falls into the description that the meme gives.
I’ve seen these kinds of capitalists defend not paying a liveable wage to someone. They are purposely misreading these messages now if they still think ‘no one wants to work anymore’
That still doesn’t make this message clear.
You’re intentionally being obtuse, troll.
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How about people who vape and grope at the theater? Asking for a congressperson.
“We had to build this place to get ready for kissinger”
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Well isn’t that… special?
Preacher, you got a smutty mind!
There are many people out that think if they make a profit, then by definition they are doing societal good.
THERE WAS A DEMAND, I AM MEETING A DEMAND!
ALSO, I CREATED THE DEMAND. OOPS.
Depends of how they make a profit.
By voluntary exchange in a free-market setting? They’re serving consumer needs and, by consequence, doing a societal good.
By using government-grant privileges to smash the competence? Nope. They’re doing more harm than good.
Scalper are not serving consumer needs, they caused the need in the first place! Just because its techincally not illegal DOES NOT make it morally good, or good for society. Scalping is greedy regardless of if its for the government or to pad your own pockets
But, all models and pandering aside, scalping is simple: Individual sellers have the ownership of a scarce economic good, and they willingly fork over ownership of the good to a willing buyer, at a price agreed upon by both (or all) parties to the transaction. As usual, state intervention in this case means that your property is not your property to do what you want with it.
Is there a more victimless crime than scalping? Of course not. It is capitalism at its purest level. An event is sold out, you need a ticket and the scalper provides you one at a mutually agreed upon price. You don’t need to be Louis Rukeyser to understand the remarkable efficiency of this market.
“Is there a more victemless crime than hording something limited i dont even want for the express purpose of forcing the actual intended customer to buy mine for way more money so i can profit off their misfortune?” Is not a very good arguement to make.
Id say stop trying to justify your vile actions, but a single glance at your profile tells me you probably go out of your way to make the lives of others worse
Is there a more victemless crime than hording something limited
There is no victim because the scalpers would hold their private property, owned by legit means, that is, buying that limited good by voluntary exchange.
forcing the actual intended customer to buy mine for way more money so i can profit off their misfortune?
The scalpers are not forcing anybody to buy their property. In fact, they’re doing a societal good by helping those customers who value that good more.
To illustrate this, imagine that a famous singer is going to be in a recital with a capacity of 50.000 people and that the ticket’s price is $70. There are, too, 120.000 people willing to buy that ticket, being $70 the minimum price.
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We’d need to understand that human beings are different and varied by nature. Except for a few innate needs, like hunger and temperature, each one of us has different ends, different ways of how to attain an end, and different order of priorities for various goals.
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An object is valuable only because there is at least one human being who believes that this object can help satisfy their subjective ends.
Now, if different human beings can have a different priority to one end (going to the recital), the economic value of that object (the ticket) that attains that end depends on how much the individual wants to satisfy their end. Being informal, we could say that the highest your priority is, the more valuable the object is to you.
- The scalpers, like any entrepreneur, analyze the market to see if they can make a profit. By supply and demand, we can easily see that the supply of tickets is way less than the demand for them, so “they exist” because the equilibrium price was not reached yet in the first place.
As we said before, there would be fans who value going to the recital more, so they would be willing to buy that ticket at a higher price. By consequence, the scalpers don’t create an artificial demand, because the fans would have a different order of priorities for that end, as value is subjective to each individual.
- The scalpers can make a profit because of those fans. There’s no “misfortune” because those fans who value going to the recital the most are actually being benefited by them.
It’s true that the supplier is the one who sets the price, but the main factor of price determination is the evaluation of the consumer, as every one of them decides in his own context whether the price paid for a good betters their life and well-being.
- In addition, scalpers absorb the time risk associated with events. Their opportunity for profit is good for the fans because it ensures that tickets will be made available.
Scalpers are hidden heroes at events. They take personal, financial, and legal risk in order to provide a critical service in the hopes of earning a profit from their labors. Many of the aspects of scalping that people decry are, in reality, a direct product of the prohibition placed on the service. The prohibition raises prices, reduces supply, and limits competition. In addition, in the absence of the prohibition of scalping, buyers would have legal recourse against unethical scalpers who sell counterfeit tickets.
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I don’t understand your complicated words. Profit gud.
Yeah, but trying to corner the market on Unicorn themed items is the only reason I keep coming back to Gaia Online now that AI Art scratches my wardrobing itch
Yeah fuck you New York bodegas!!!1!
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TIL selling stuff is a mortal sin
Taking advantage of you excess resources to manipulate people into give you theirs, is the problem.
Don’t get me wrong (you and the other 2 downvoters) I think bezos deserves way more than hell; but if it’s just a lemonade stand, that, by the meme that I was jokingly criticizing, is still buying stuff in bulk and selling it for a profit. Is it morally bankrupt (intended) to have a family buisness?
Not under the current systems, exploitation is built in, no way to avoid it if you directly engage by starting a business. You’re missing the point though, this meme is about scalpers, people who buy as much as possible of a high demand item to sell it higher than its legitimate market value. When the profit off the product exceeds costs to provide the product you’re exploiting people and scapers attempt to maximize that exploitation.
I agree on scalpers, i like my electronics cheap. The meme was quite not clear though. I thought it was about sellers and resellers in general.
