The subjects of this story, Matt Colvin and Noah Colvin, spent days driving from store to store, buying up all of the antiseptic supplies the stores had. Then they ordered pallets more online wherever they could. Everywhere they bought, they tried to completely clean out the supplier's stock.<p>Then of course they started selling their hoard online for multiples of their purchase price.<p>I don't say this lightly: Fuck these assholes. If this article is accurate, then these guys are true pieces of human shit. Amazon and Ebay should be applauded for shutting them down.<p>Some rise in prices is natural and expected; the only alternative is enforced rationing. But what these guys do is different; they're trying to create privation and desperation in the market so they can profit from it.<p>It's difficult -- maybe impossible -- to make this activity illegal in a way that doesn't critically threaten the legitimate free market, and that's an important aspect of the evil that these people do.
The amount of rationalization on their part makes me want to vomit. That Dollar General in Kentucky was there and provisioned for the needs of it's local market.<p>Them jumping in and clearing things out completely blows the hell out of what is a carefully optimized logistics network tuned via competition to keep prices down, and doubling down on resource expenditure to get product from manufacturer to end user at the cheapest cost possible by inflating the number of miles it has to physically travel all in the name of maybe being able to get away with massive price markups.<p>This behavior is why we can't ever seem to have nice things. Fuck these people and their reckless chicanery. May their reputations follow them for the foreseeable future.
> Mr. Colvin does not believe he was price gouging. While he charged $20 on Amazon for two bottles of Purell that retail for $1 each, he said people forget that his price includes his labor, Amazon’s fees and about $10 in shipping. (Alcohol-based sanitizer is pricey to ship because officials consider it a hazardous material.)<p>If it's FBA, he only has to pay to ship the items in bulk to Amazon. If it's FBM, Amazon actually gives you a shipping credit (though when I was doing it years ago, it often wouldn't cover the full cost to ship it).
<i>Mr. Colvin does not believe he was price gouging. While he charged $20 on Amazon for two bottles of Purell that retail for $1 each, he said people forget that his price includes his labor, Amazon’s fees and about $10 in shipping. (Alcohol-based sanitizer is pricey to ship because officials consider it a hazardous material.</i><p>This is bollocks. Anybody wrongly offended, should try to figure out which one is wrong, the word or the concept of feeding on misery. This person is price gouging.
The link on the submission is broken. The correct link is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-purell-wipes-amazon-sellers.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-pu...</a>
Slightly offtopic, but should you need sanitizer and your local stores are out of stock — perhaps due to people like the subjects of this article — you can make your own based on this guide from the WHO:
<a href="https://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/Guide_to_Local_Production.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/Guide_to_Local_Production.pdf</a>
My local grocery store was out of hand sanitizer mid week. When I went this morning there were two shopping carts full of it by the front door, being sold at the regular price. Didn't look like anyone was buying any. The store likely was out mid week because of people like Mr. Colvin. They thought they could corner the market and know nothing about the ability of the US logistics system to resupply in face of a small increase in demand likely caused by speculators rather than a huge spike in demand.
To those who can't find the article for whatever reason:<p><a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/he-has-17700-bottles-of-hand-sanitizer-and-nowhere-to-sell-them/ar-BB11blvS" rel="nofollow">https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/he-has-17700-bottles-of-ha...</a><p><a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/business/he-has-17700-bottles-of-hand-sanitizer-and-nowhere-to-sell-them/" rel="nofollow">https://www.seattletimes.com/business/he-has-17700-bottles-o...</a><p><a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tennessee-man-sitting-on-almost-18000-bottles-of-hand-sanitizer-says-hes-doing-a-public-service-2020-03-14" rel="nofollow">https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tennessee-man-sitting-on-a...</a><p><a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/03/the-hand-sanitizer-you-cant-find-is-in-this-putzs-garage" rel="nofollow">https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/03/the-hand-sanitizer-...</a><p><a href="https://newschannel9.com/news/local/report-two-chattanooga-brothers-stockpile-thousands-of-bottles-of-hand-sanitizer" rel="nofollow">https://newschannel9.com/news/local/report-two-chattanooga-b...</a>
> I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me.<p>Meaning he just hoped no one would notice.
Correct link (not sure what’s wrong with the current one): <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-purell-wipes-amazon-sellers.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-pu...</a>