Buy high, sell low, amirite?
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There’s no shame in what they’re doing. They’re just the most recent in a long line of people who buy something that they resell for a mark-up, and the practice goes back millenia. The traders along the Silk Road did the same thing hundreds of years ago. Things cost exactly what people are willing to pay. Trader Joe’s can gut their profits by selling directly through an online website. Cut out all of the middle men.
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My Exwife was addicted to Diet Coke and she even had me hooked for awhile. They had a sale for a week for like $2.50 a 12 pack with a 4 pack limit. We bought stopped by every day after work and made a ziggeraut.
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I don’t see a problem with this at all. They’re taking something that a lot of folks don’t have access to and reselling it, w/out deception, for a small profit. More power to them.
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There’s a long tradition of the secondary Trader Joe’s market. TJs has convinced a set of people that nothing else will do and then those people move and have to find a middle-man. I’m pretty sure Boing Boing has covered this sort of thing in the past.
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Most stores will remove the tax if you can show them a valid resale permit.
The same thing seems to be happening with Costco house brand merch, with sales to those without club cards.
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I recently learned there is a guy on ebay who sells Lego parts at huge markups-- the idea is adults who buy the fancy Star Wars Lego models will lose one small piece, and rather than buy a whole new $70 set, they will pay $10 for that one piece, so he can part-out a set piece by piece, but it means an initial investment of one of each big set.
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I was in a TJs last year and a person in front of me took the last one of something I was waiting to grab. I looked in their cart and they had a bunch of them, beyond what you’d buy for personal consumption, so I was curious. I looked it up and found that what was a $2 item at TJs was on Amazon for over ten bucks (might even have been $16?). Obvsly Amazon fees and all that had me wondering how much they could rly make.
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We do this with cracker barrel cheese when it goes half price. It tastes great, and it pretty much never goes bad. Don’t tell anyone else here though, I don’t need to get cheese-shamed 
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Pirate Joe’s has to have been covered on bb…
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no. buy stocks while sober.
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Same with Ikea, and for basically the same reasons.
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I always laugh at people who find a niche way to make money that is super easy to duplicate and then give away their entire secret to a media interview, without even considering for a moment that in just a week or two, someone is going to destroy their profit by simply duplicating what they do.
This happens so often there should be a name for it.
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Nothing new here, unless you haven’t heard of the well-known arbitrage system thousands of people use world-wide between Fleabay and the BezosMonopoly, or betwen Etsy and Fleabay, or between literally dozens of other site pairs. There are people who claim to make millions a year. The most sophisticated ones have software do all the work; they never lay a finger on the products they sell.
I do it on a (very) small scale and … it works.
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The Lego buy-a-single part market is big, as is the Ebay Lego reseller market. One site is bricklink. I have used it in the past to turn a $10 garage sale 99.9% complete StarWars set into a $300 Ebay 100% complete set.
I know people who have - not kidding here - MANY tons of Lego parts that they assemble into sets and sell on Ebay.
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There are many variations on this. I see Kirkland (Costco house brand), Equate (Walmart house brand), and Prince and Spring (Boxed.com house brand) products on Amazon all the time at hugely inflated prices.
I’ve also seen bots that automatically relist Amazon items on eBay for somewhat inflated prices. If you buy those items, the seller buys it for you from Amazon and has it drop shipped directly to you, which is way more efficient than actually buying up physical inventory and paying Amazon to store it.
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Somehow Dune made keeping the spice flowing way more compelling.
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It’s real easy to be hypnotized by something when you’re already a fan of it.
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Mammon Magazine
1 Like
