Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/25/couple-makes-30k-reselling-tr.html
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I don’t know if I’d call this underhanded or not. If they’re not lying to the folks they resell to, then I can’t see anything really wrong with it. They’re not getting their stock by any fraudulent means, and nobody makes anybody shop on Amazon.
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"you can make a pretty decent income just by walking into a store,”
Right.
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I researched this product when I was making bagels at home. There isn’t a lot of competition. If you don’t have access to Trader Joe’s, you don’t have a lot of alternative options. Most products are huge bulk for commercial bakeries. TJ doesn’t sell it online, so nothing stopping these people from making it happen.
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Hypothetically, though, if they picked up 100 Everything But the Bagel seasonings a day for a year and sold all 36,500, they could earn $29,200.
Well cool, but how much have they actually made? This seems like a colossal waste of time and effort without a decent payoff.
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Well, if you have a lot of time and are underemployed it probably makes sense.
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Yeah. I have used “Fulfilled By Amazon” before, and they take a cut of as much as 66% of the price, PLUS they charge storage fees. Some quick math indicates this couple made perhaps around $700 profit from the 71 bottles mentioned. Not bad I guess, but they must have moved a LOT of those bottles to make $30k. (Sorry, bad math, I thought they were selling those $2 bottles for $30, from a mis-read of the headline.)
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A quick google search suggests there’s a fair number of options. And of course, it’s not exactly a complicated spice mix–the individual ingredients are easily assembled, But then, I make enough bagels that I pretty much always have at least poppy and sesame seed on hand anyway.
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Oh my god, it’s a mirage
I’m tellin’ y’all, it’s arbitrage
I feel bad for this little couple and their side hustle. I hope they knew it was too good to last. This article appears to have blown it for them. There are currently 174 sellers for this product on Amazon, and on the first page of sellers 60% of the sellers are marked “Just Launched.” Things like this are low-hanging fruit for the millions of struggling middle class opportunists. Most of them will regret it, though. Current low price is $0.20 + $4.99 S&H.
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I can get everything bagels at the supermarket. They’re good.
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Is this where we talk about how startlingly efficient capitalism is?
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Interesting that a magazine called “Money” can’t really figure out the economics of this as well as the comments thread on Boing Boing.
(not /S)
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P T Barnum knew of such markets and catered to them well.
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Your math might be a bit off. The article suggests they could make almost $30k on 36500 bottles of the stuff, which works out to around $0.80 per. It’s a pretty healthy margin on a $2 purchase.
My question to them would be “Why did you tell the world about this?”
The only barrier to market entry for this sort of thing is knowing what products have a good margin. Certainly others knew about the spice, but now so many have started selling it, there isn’t any profit in it. Presumably the couple is making more from their YouTube videos than from the products they’re describing.
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You’re right. I misread the headline, thought they were selling $2 bottle for $30 (missed the “k” in $30k).
You’re also right that they shouldn’t have told everyone about it.
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Reminds me of the guy who re-sold Monopoly on Amazon to people who couldn’t be bothered to try Walmart:
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Not bagel spices, but sellers like this can be very useful to me, a consumer, when my local marketplace decides my desires are too niche to serve and declines to take my money.
tl;dr this is one way to serve folks on the long tail
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A few months ago I was at the grocery store and notice this Dodge Caravan.
The back end was drooping like the springs were broken or it was full of dead bodies.
A closer look showed that the rear seats were removed and it was ALMOST filled with 12-packs of Coke in cans. As I am standing there, staring at this, a guy comes up with a shopping cart filled with…12-packs of Coke.
I figure he is responsible for this and just ask him what he is doing with all that Coke?
“Is it illegal?” he barks back.
“No” I replied, “I just wondered what you would do with so much of it, a party or something?”
“It is on sale and I am sending it to Haiti to the poor families” he responds.
“How many can you fit in the van?”
He stops for a moment and thinks, then answers “325 cases”.
Well OK then, carry on. I checked inside and sure enough the Coke in 12-packs was on sale for 1/2 price.
I saw that Dodge filled with Coke 2 more times in the next week. I still have no clue what he was actually going to do with it all. Was he reselling it? If so, where? A convenience store? Flea Market? Gas station? Even with 1/2 price he was paying sales tax on it which he would not have to do if he purchased it wholesale for a store.
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congrats now you understand why day trading is a bad idea
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Correct! But this article only sped up the inevitable market forces. If you have a success like this on Amazon, competitors will quickly detect it and they will come for you. In addition to the essential oil crowd, there are are some monster multi-million dollar companies that jump on opportunities like this. River Colony Trading, for one. They’re a beast, and they are not shy about retail arbitrage.
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