I guess this is one way to make a living. Is it sustainable? Is it gratifying? Is it scalable?<p>The guy is a hustler, I can appreciate that. He works for himself, I can appreciate that.<p>However if lots of other people try to do the same thing then does all the competition create a situation where lots of people are squabbling over a few crumbs? It looks like its a niche. And its only a matter of time others try to muscle in on his turf.
Most Americans don't know there's a subeconomy in the U.S. where Chinese merchants buy items from retail stores and sell them to customers in China. The successful ones hire people to shop in stores. What do they buy? iPhones, diapers, baby formula, LV purses, lottery tickets...
For an idea of how this business goes on an average day.<p><a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/07/26/539552579/episode-629-buy-low-sell-prime" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/07/26/539552579/epis...</a>
This strikes me as wildly unsustainable and something that just can't last, with a big caveat: I thought the exact same thing when people were doing this 20 years ago buying vacuum cleaners at Kmart and flipping them on eBay.<p>My understanding is that people (like this guy) who are good at this pretty rapidly graduate to doing drop shipping and more online speciality work.
Are there penalties to posting goods you don't have and selling them before you have them in-hand? Does Amazon penalize sellers for cancelling orders if they can't be delivered?
For some reason our office manager will only order stuff off Amazon which leads to funny scenarios where we'll get 12 pack of soda that was ordered from Amazon but was shipped from Costco with the Amazon sellers name on the billing but our office as the shipping. Down at the local Kroger the 12 pack was probably 15% cheaper...
This is what /r/flipping is about 'buy low, sell high'. There's nothing new or novel about this, some people make livings doing this sort of thing using FBA and eBay.<p>Similarly there is /r/churning where you use credit cards and line of credit to extract profit by strategically exploiting promotional offers.
I love this part of the video (<a href="https://youtu.be/FknkqT5tHK8?t=57" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/FknkqT5tHK8?t=57</a>). "Traffic is hades" points camera to traffic moving along nicely. I'd love to live in a place where traffic like that is "bad".
I used to do support and marketing for a retail arbitrage app called Profit Bandit.<p>I used to invite local users out to Grocery Outlet in Portland (bargain grocery store), give them all $50 and see who found the best/most profitable stuff.<p>Once when testing the app at a Goodwill down the street from the office I found a book we ended up selling for around $100 (paid $3 for it).
I got stuck in line at a K-mart during its close out sale with a man that did something similar with Magic cards. He buys the yearly packs, when they’re on sale. He removes the valuable cards. Sells them independently for $10+ dollars. Due to sales and extreme sales like the close out, he makes a few grand a year. Nice work if you can get it.
I am surprised Walmart don't limit how many you can buy. This seems like it is priced to bring people into the store, not make a huge profit for Walmart on its own.