Scalpers say the press treats them unfairly; they are a 'valuable industry'

It's true. They prevent entitled kids from killing themselves. Mommy and daddy depend on scalpers
BS!
If scalpers did not exist, mommy and daddy would have bought at MSRP, instead the fools they are, with more money than sense they payed x2 or more, so that their failed parenting would not turn into a headache or tragedy with their child throwing a tantrum or worse...

Both scalpers and the fools with more money than sense are the issue, one after another.
 
If there are a limited number of an in demand item, people prepared to spend more money will get them first, welcome to capitalism. We don’t all queue up as equals and wait our turn, that is not how our society allocates things! I’m waiting to buy a gpu and maybe a cpu, once there is one at the price I’m prepared to pay, I’ll buy it, I don’t care who they bought it from.

There is no evidence individual scalpers are capable of operating at a market manipulating scale, it would take an insane amount of capital to buy such a huge amount of stock. The fact many people are doing it individually is not a market manipulation.

Automating the purchasing process or using a computer to complete a check out process isn’t a crime! As long as they don’t hack into a system, dodge paying taxes on profits or steal the items, I see no issue whatsoever.

We can either pay more or wait until the people prepared to pay more get theirs, maybe its a good incentive to find a way to earn more money.

Exactly, I'm using a ryzen 2600 and recently went to cutting edge gamer when my Rx 580 died and am paying for an RTX 2060 super. I'm not overly thrilled with having to make a monthly payment but I chose to do it because I didn't feel like going without a video card or using something much worse that I do have, like the gtx 570 on a shelf.

I don't blame the scalper and I don't see any problem with it honestly, they are making money their way I can choose not to purchase from them and I have. it's choice nobody is making anybody by anything from the scalpers. This would be newsworthy and relevant if there was proof of scalpers going up to parents at Walmart and putting a gun to their head and saying by my PS5.
 
Exactly, I'm using a ryzen 2600 and recently went to cutting edge gamer when my Rx 580 died and am paying for an RTX 2060 super. I'm not overly thrilled with having to make a monthly payment but I chose to do it because I didn't feel like going without a video card or using something much worse that I do have, like the gtx 570 on a shelf.

I don't blame the scalper and I don't see any problem with it honestly, they are making money their way I can choose not to purchase from them and I have. it's choice nobody is making anybody by anything from the scalpers. This would be newsworthy and relevant if there was proof of scalpers going up to parents at Walmart and putting a gun to their head and saying by my PS5.
Even more so when they are using ebay auctions, you are literally bidding against other people who want one, the product ends up going to the person who values it most. If I didn’t have a working PC, I’d value a card much higher than in my current situation where I would just like to play with better grpahics at 4k.
 
What is enabling this is with a limited amount of supply and an outsized demand. Scalping is illegal if the price is manipulated by doing it, as opposed to just reselling something at a higher price to take advantage of what people are offering to buy for something and what retailers are willing to sell something for. If scalping affect the availability of supply in an entire market to force people to buy from them, then yes, it is illegal.

What you are describing are different examples of relling items with a limited supply, but these are not entire markets and there is no outsized demand (given that the console market is an oligopoly and they transition with huge shifts in product offerings). Another example of illegal reselling is when you buy and sell something for an outsized profit because of a crisis (ie. toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic).

Here's a better translation of scalping done here that's illegal: buying up all the homes being sold in a town and reselling them for way more than they're worth because you have a monopoly on any new offerings. Let me know if this is a false equivalency, but I don't think it is.

None of your examples is illegal in my country (NZ) and I don't think likely in any western democracy. In fact, I would say property speculation in NZ is a national pastime. I'm looking forward to selling my place eventually at the most ridiculous price I can get for it. If I had the money I would buy lots of houses, keep them for a year and offload them at a big profit.

I personally don't care about scalpers (of any product) because I am happy to wait them out. When the demand drops back a bit and the supply comes up a bit, and other factors like the packaging shortages, trump tariffs etc get resolved and bitcoin shits itself again, then the prices will drop back to lower than MSRP like it always does eventually. Scalpers might be annoying but they are an easy target for why items are in such short demand and are so expensive. They are a minor problem in the great scheme of things.

 
...and bitcoin shits itself again, then the prices will drop back to lower than MSRP
I sure hope so. I'll never get to owning a whole BTC if the price climbs like this forever. I was only able to buy one Ether because Dogecoin pumped!
 
Lulz, I am far to lazy to scalp. I have thousands of dollars of various types of equipment (not computer stuff) which I should be selling before it loses its value but I just don't ever want to deal with eBay or Craigslist or any of that crap.

So it sits.
HAHA! I can relate. I'm too lazy to even just buy two so I can offset the cost of the one I keep. And I used to sell stuff in eBay all the time. Don't have time for that crap anymore.
 
The milk analogy is crap, because farmers aren't short of milk. To make that analogy work you basically have to buy all the milk from a super market and then sell it for twice the price. F scalpers, they're scum and they will be the downfall of consumerism as we know it.
 
Dec 2017 it was $20K, 3 months later on Feb 2018 it was $3K. Will happen again.
It dropped to $3K last March during the COVID crash. I bought some but I'm still kicking myself for not YOLOing more in; if I'd borrowed at the time I could have paid that and the interest off by now and had most of it left over. At least I'd been in crypto long enough by that point to recognize the opportunity.
 
It dropped to $3K last March during the COVID crash. I bought some but I'm still kicking myself for not YOLOing more in; if I'd borrowed at the time I could have paid that and the interest off by now and had most of it left over. At least I'd been in crypto long enough by that point to recognize the opportunity.
Yeah, but leverage can be dangerous too!
 
The milk analogy is crap, because farmers aren't short of milk. To make that analogy work you basically have to buy all the milk from a supermarket and then sell it for twice the price. F scalpers, they're scum and they will be the downfall of consumerism as we know it.
They aren't ruining it, I think scalpers are the ultimate expression of consumerism. If anything they show Nvidia, AMD, Intel etc that they have been selling their product for too little as clearly there is a market for ridiculously overpriced poor value for money CPUs and GPUs.
 
They aren't ruining it, I think scalpers are the ultimate expression of consumerism. If anything they show Nvidia, AMD, Intel etc that they have been selling their product for too little as clearly there is a market for ridiculously overpriced poor value for money CPUs and GPUs.

This is more consoles than PCs, but they need to undercut their competition. They know there are rich people willing to pay, but the problem is they need platform adoption more then they need to make profit on per sale basis. They can't increase prices cause the moment they lose market share, then those rich people only want to have the popular platform. Clearly this is not a pricing problem.
 
This is more consoles than PCs, but they need to undercut their competition. They know there are rich people willing to pay, but the problem is they need platform adoption more then they need to make profit on per sale basis. They can't increase prices cause the moment they lose market share, then those rich people only want to have the popular platform. Clearly this is not a pricing problem.
console pricing is fine, I agree, make the money on subscriptions and game sales. In hindsight, top end GPUs like the 3080 were about $500 under priced and amd 5900x/5950x at least $100 under priced. Shareholders should be pissed about missed opportunity, but they’ll probably just see headline growth and be happy.
 
At this point I think we deserve what we get. I see a lot of people saying oh just go earn more. And then oh just wait until prices go down. How long is it going to be until those people who are the actual life blood of this civilization, you know the ones making your fancy lattes, and feeding you, and growing your crops, are going to take it? Just the other day all of the people on here were complaining about quantumphysics flaunting his wealth. This stuff has real consequences on the hearts and minds of struggling people like parents who's kids are going to school and are treated as inferior because they don't have the latest. People are paying these ridiculous prices just to be cool too and suffering the consequences unfortunately, but it's a huge social problem that could lead to very bad results and that is what concerns me.
 
There is demand for scalpers' services, which is why they exist. While it would be great if everyone would eliminate this demand as scavengerspc said, there are a lot of people for whom $1K or more is a perfectly fine price to pay for an Xbox or PS4, or $1.5K for a 3080 or 6800XT.

Good luck getting rid of people with lots of money. If the cost of living in your city is 3x somewhere else, and you accordingly get paid that 3x, suddenly that Xbox is now functionally 1/3 the price.
There is ZERO demand for their services. If scalpers ceased to exist not a single person in the entire world would morn their passing. You sound like you're part of the problem, along with anyone who would pay the price a scalper sets.
 
There is ZERO demand for their services. If scalpers ceased to exist not a single person in the entire world would morn their passing. You sound like you're part of the problem, along with anyone who would pay the price a scalper sets.

If demand didn't exist, then why are they selling millions of $ worth of products? That sounds like a supplier who is responding to a demand for a product. But you're right, the problem here is that they're creating the supply constraint with superior tech that regular people don't use, which is why they're a bunch of AHoles gaming the system.

And why do you assume I would pay a scalper for anything? You missed my post about being lazy, that includes putting 3x the effort into getting 3x more money for an overpriced product. Sounds like too much work.
 
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At this point I think we deserve what we get. I see a lot of people saying oh just go earn more. And then oh just wait until prices go down. How long is it going to be until those people who are the actual life blood of this civilization, you know the ones making your fancy lattes, and feeding you, and growing your crops, are going to take it? Just the other day all of the people on here were complaining about quantumphysics flaunting his wealth. This stuff has real consequences on the hearts and minds of struggling people like parents who's kids are going to school and are treated as inferior because they don't have the latest. People are paying these ridiculous prices just to be cool too and suffering the consequences unfortunately, but it's a huge social problem that could lead to very bad results and that is what concerns me.
I vote for the party in my country most supportive of a living minimum wage, our free medical care system, regulation of natural monopolies like water and electricity, more welfare and paid for with higher taxes for my own income bracket. I believe that every person deserves to have health care, a roof over their head, food in the fridge and a heater in winter, and if they cannot afford it, we should provide it as a society, but not an RTX 3080 or a PS5.

We are talking about high end computer hardware for a hobby. No, a barista might not be able to afford to play the latest flight simulator game at 4k. They could probably afford a second hand pc and play it at HD though.

Who can afford the top of the line computer? The cafe owner, who used to be a barrista, but learnt skills and worked their butt off for 5 years building their business, also the barrista who started a business roasting their own coffee and selling it to cafes, also the barrista who went to a coding bootcamp and now works as a software developer...but also the barrista who bought 3080s and 5900x stock on launch day and auctioned them on eBay!

Who doesn’t play the flight simulator because they can afford to buy their own plane? The the cafe owner who built a brand and started a franchise, the coffee roaster who built a brand and became a national supplier and the software developer who started a highly scalable tech business.

If you want to consume more, you have to provide more first.
 
console pricing is fine, I agree, make the money on subscriptions and game sales. In hindsight, top end GPUs like the 3080 were about $500 under priced and amd 5900x/5950x at least $100 under priced. Shareholders should be pissed about missed opportunity, but they’ll probably just see headline growth and be happy.

While that sounds like a direct expression of economics, there's a point where pricing excludes enough people except at the highest end, and companies risk being labeled as elitist and only for the rich. Some companies choose this because they have enough rich buyers (during the good times at least) that they don't care that regular people can't buy their stuff, but I don't think Sony/MS/Nvidia/AMD can afford to do that as they're the primary and almost *only* players in the CPU/GPU/Console product field.

People really get in a huff when the only thing they can buy is hideously overpriced, like GPUs right now. Lambo/Ferrari/Bugatti can get away with it because we still have Mazda, Toyota, etc.
 
While that sounds like a direct expression of economics, there's a point where pricing excludes enough people except at the highest end, and companies risk being labeled as elitist and only for the rich. Some companies choose this because they have enough rich buyers (during the good times at least) that they don't care that regular people can't buy their stuff, but I don't think Sony/MS/Nvidia/AMD can afford to do that as they're the primary and almost *only* players in the CPU/GPU/Console product field.

People really get in a huff when the only thing they can buy is hideously overpriced, like GPUs right now. Lambo/Ferrari/Bugatti can get away with it because we still have Mazda, Toyota, etc.
I mean the toyota/ lexus setup is one way to get around that. If I was structuring the nvidia lineup, I would evaluate having both geforce brand up to 3070 and the titan line for the 3080 (with more ram) and 3090 and just crank the margins way up? I reckon AMD would follow suit once they got a bit of market share, they are good at segmentation with their threadripper series. Also the titan brand lets your premium customers flex a but more because they don’t use the mainstream geforce product.
 
There is a reason scalping is not allowed with certain products. That very reason holds true for all products. So why are we even debating the merits of scalping? It should be illegal across the board, preventing markup above MSRP. In my opinion; if the price stays below MSRP, it's not really scalping.
 
Is scalping illegal? In most places, no. Is scalping ethical or moral? Ask the scalpers this... If they had to use their real names and addresses to do their 'business' would they still do it? That will tell the tale.
 
There is a reason scalping is not allowed with certain products. That very reason holds true for all products. So why are we even debating the merits of scalping? It should be illegal across the board, preventing markup above MSRP. In my opinion; if the price stays below MSRP, it's not really scalping.
It isn’t illegal in most places or only for basic essentials of life.

Reselling at the highest market clearing price (particularly using auctions) is an efficient way to maximise profit in the supply chain and allocate stock to those who value it the most (will pay the most). This is similar to a real estate auction, where a house sells to the person with the capacity and willingness pay the highest price.

Most people complaining about this practice believe everyone should queue and get things in that order despite someone else being willing to pay a higher price. That is how school kids are taught to behave, not how the real world works.
 
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