Husband and wife team proudly reselling sanitizers and wipes at quadruple prices

Where is the justice department on price gouging? I thought the adminstration said days ago they would be cracking down? I’m sure amazon and costco will be very cooperative?

1 Like

For the last week or so, San Diego Costcos have been limiting sales of toilet paper, bottled water, etc to 2 cases per customer. This is very unusual. The only other limit of this type I’ve ever seen at Costco is when they get a very limited amount of fancy Japanese whiskey and all my degenerate fancy Japanese whiskey fan friends go try to buy it all in one go.

2 Likes

since it’s a declared emergency in many states now, this is a literally a crime and some states have hotlines to report the gouging

happens every hurricane too, they are experienced at prosecuting this stuff

7 Likes

There’s always assholes like these… (I wouldn’t even call them vultures or hyenas, that would be unfair to those awesome animals.) It’s especially bad in areas with few stores that sell out fast, so people who actually need the stuff could buy them, so they have no choice but to buy from the dickwinkle resellers. Over here a few years ago some assholes did it with lactose-free dairy stuff, they bought all of it from the local Aldi and resold it on exorbitant prices. Now similar shit is happening with masks - what makes that even worse is that in the meanwhile hospital workers don’t have access to masks either.

Weirdly enough, over here there’s no toilet paper in stores, but there’s still tons and tons of paper tissues. Frankly at this rate if I can’t get any more TP I’ll just resign to wiping my butt with luxuriously soft and fragrant tissues…

2 Likes

Retail arbitrage, ladies and gentlemen

2 Likes
12 Likes

Warning: using other paper products as TP substitutes is highly likely to result in clogged plumbing.

OTOH…

11 Likes

“I did receive a short text message from Mr. Ranga late last night after the story was published and it basically said people are writing very crazy things now. And he had a sad face emoticon after that,” Quan said.

10 Likes

The first grocery store I was at today was completely out of bananas. (Just L… never mind.) How do you horde bananas??

5 Likes

That should be declared as business income.

The Canada Revenue Agency does have an anonymous tax fraud reporting form - https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/programs/about-canada-revenue-agency-cra/suspected-tax-cheating-in-canada-overview.html - just in case anyone is interested in submitting the article.

4 Likes

It might be an indication of how supermarkets rely on regular purchasing patterns to manage their supply chains. Change a few factors in the market and things fall apart. For example, they may have diverted transport or stocking resources from bananas to hand sanitizer, and finished up running out of both.

3 Likes

If only there was some kind of, I dunno, tool we could use, to even calculate, like, the exact profit, assuming it’s $100K in sales and we know the items were being sold at 4x the purchase price. What a world it would be! :wink:

2 Likes

You might say craptocurrency wipes out cryptocurrency?

They do freeze well, mmmmm mmmm. It gets sweeter and turns into a yummy icey treat. Great for smoothies, or just by themselves, or I imagine with a little peanut butter, etc.

5 Likes

Apparently from a grocery store in Brooklyn:

4 Likes

It’s the American Dream. /s

6 Likes

https://boingboing.net/?s=gentleman

11 Likes

Costco has special memberships for institutions, resellers etc. they could waive the limits for them within reason.

4 Likes

I expected 3/4 of that 100K to be profit, but the article states that they spent $70K on products and have made $100K in sales.
Nothing to shake a stick at, to be sure, but less than I expected.

2 Likes

Wow. They could use those cleaning products to clean up a HUGE mess in their front yard or in the back of their pickup truck. Or maybe at one of their flip houses.

3 Likes