A while back, when my YouTube recommendations were skewing heavily towards Lego commentary I ran across this one guy complaining about a new-to-him scam. He had purchased several Lego sets at Walmart only to find that in every one the minifigures and several of the hard-to-find special pieces had been removed. Looking closely he could see where the box had been carefully opened and then just as carefully re-glued shut.
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So, going the extra mile for carbon footprint, yes?
The only slightly underhanded part is that Amazon lists them as “Trader Joe’s Everything but The Bagel Sesame Seasoning Blend 2.3 Oz
by Trader Joe’s”
Not "by some random couple with an internet storefront "
If you have a complaint and contact Amazon, they’ll say it was sold by a 3rd party and they are just the fulfillment agent. If you contact Trader Joe’s, they might say they don’t sell through Amazon and you didn’t buy it from them. (Or maybe make good for customer satisfaction)
(Its even worse if the seller starts introducing counterfeits in their shipment to Amazon warehouse. They buy enough so Trader Joes might think it is their product resold, and make good on the counterfeits)
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I bought 4 gallons of diesel motor oil on Amazon to do an oil change on my truck. It arrived in a Walmart.com box with a shipping invoice/packing list inside showing me as the ship-to and someone else’s name as the buyer along with the walmart.com price paid by him. There was an $8.33 difference between that price and the amazon.com price I paid. So the guy made say $3 to $5 on his arbitrage, after amazon commission. Made me wonder whether this is really an individual doing this or an organized walmart.com play to convert amazon shoppers to walmart.
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There is also a strange market for complete Lego sets with the minifigs removed. To be sold separately.
I can’t stand it
I know you planned it
Imma set it straight
This grocerygate
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$30K?
They buy the spice at $2 and a quick check on amazon shows they sell it at $6, a $4 difference. Then amazon takes their cut, which I think is about a third, let just say they get $3 in profit per jar. You’ll need to sell 10K jars or about 30 jars a day within a year.
That seems a bit high to be real.
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This couple’s story is just a reminder that you can sometimes play our shitty capitalist system and profit until everyone notices.
Interestingly, at least in Germany, shops refuse to sell you anything in quantities which exceeds “usual household quantity”.
For some reason, I have seen signs posted on drugs store shelves all around Germany during the last couple of years defining infant milk powder household quantity between four and six boxes. Usually the printout is fixed to the premium brand section, but sometimes just states that any infant nutrition is sold in limited amounts only.
I talked to people about this who had children about six to three years ago (my usual peer group, currently) and they all say this predated the milk powder scandals in France. Some volunteered stories of Asian (specifically Chinese) visitors buying as many packages as would fit in their luggage, and we talked about a milk scandal in China which might have prompted that.
However, I’ve also seen it in the vicinity of the Swiss-German border where very few Asian visitors are present, and suspect some people just take advantage of the low price compared to neighbouring markets. Swiss families in recent years usually buy massive amounts of all foodstuff, and drugstore products, in German. (The difference in price was about threefold for drugstore products produced in Switzerland (!) when I casually checked two years ago. ) I can only guess tax limits are counted per person, so the Swiss brought their kids for shopping, because often everyone in the family had an own cart at the counter.
Brexit is going to be fun at the Irish border, and no mistake. The shitty quality of Irish mail aside, there will be resellers to the EU market at some point. (Ha, Amazon even has it’s EU HQ there thanks to tax haven status.) And they simply cannot re-erect the control posts.
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It’s called competition.
The problem for me is the resellers often buy up the stock before I can get any.
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In the UK at least most stores reserve the right to do that. I suspect it’s the same in the US. Whether they do of course depends on whimsy.
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I’ve seen it on advertisement in Germany, actually. Can’t remember where and when, but might even been one of the large discounters’ special offers.
Just FTR, Aldi and Lidl - and sure as hell others as well - calculate serendipity shopping into their special offers. They don’t make a margin on many special offers, but use those to attract customers. So it’s quite natural that they have to limit the amount a single customer can purchase. Driving off with a lorry full of one product? Forget it.
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I just checked in our system. An Amazon-fulfilled item with a price of $6.99 has fees of $3.46. That item costs us $1.70. That leaves 1.83 as the delta between per item costs and sell price. Their cost is .30 higher, so their delta is $1.53. Depending on which store category they sell in (probably a grocery category), their costs could be higher or lower. Since it’s a perishable item, I assume their cost is higher.
Items with fast turnover usually don’t incur storage fees.
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I’ve bought the Kirkland brand version of a particular over the counter medicine because although I have a Canadian Costco membership you can’t get that medicine in that form in Canada. As a result it’s much more expensive here than in the US, so it can make sense economically.
Although I’m in the states often enough that it’s easy just to buy it there.
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Maybe this is secretly a viral marketing campaign to get people to go to Trader Joe’s and snaffle all of the Bagel Spice?
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Here’s the real story:
Amazon makes billions reselling other people’s stuff on Amazon, a globally successful reseller of other people’s stuff, a company that has a primary mission of reselling other people’s stuff.
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I think there’s not enough protest here that this Boing Boing article has a very bad headline. The couple doesn’t make $30k a year, because Trader Joe’s never would sell them 100 seasonings each day and there wouldn’t be enough demand that the couple could sell 100 seasonings at amazon each day.
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You scoff, but I made mad $$$ just the other day exactly this way. Walked into a store, spotted a loose cord from a vacuum cleaner the staff hadn’t cleared off the floor…
Viola! One half-way decent acting job and extreme (feigned) “knee pain” later, and I’m due a 6-figure insurance settlement.
Complain if you want but hey, you got to define your hustle or your hustle defines you. Whatever it takes, I say, in the late-stage-capitalist world we live in.
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That would be awesome.
All these people across the country have bought up ALL the bagel seasoning at hundreds of Trader Joe’s stores. This is really going to screw with Trader Joe’s inventory management and supply chain. All the local Trader Joe’s buyers are thinking, “Man, people can’t get enough of this bagel seasoning!” But actually, people already have way too much, and they can’t sell it because there’s too much competition.
Paula Poundstone had a bit about this–taking her whole audience to 7-11 and buying all their Slim Jims. The next week the 7-11 would stock way up on Slim Jims, but no one would show up.
There might be. It’s ranked #39 in the Grocery and Gourmet category. That’s likely a sale every minute or two. Maybe faster. It’s a product people love, and that they constantly use up and buy more of. Certain items on Amazon sell at blinding fast rates.
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So basically you say that they should sell about 20K jars to make $30K. Twice as many as I thought.
