Our greatest businessmen always have the best lawn furniture.
Posted on 03/14/2020 9:52:34 AM PDT by grundle
On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver SUV to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tennessee, they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home Depot. At each store, they cleaned out the shelves.
Over the next three days, Noah Colvin took a 1,300-mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U-Haul truck with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes, mostly from “little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods,” his brother said. “The major metro areas were cleaned out.”
Matt Colvin stayed home near Chattanooga, preparing for pallets of even more wipes and sanitizer he had ordered, and starting to list them on Amazon. Colvin said he had posted 300 bottles of hand sanitizer and immediately sold them all for between $8 and $70 each, multiples higher than what he had bought them for. To him, “it was crazy money.” To many others, it was profiteering from a pandemic.
The next day, Amazon pulled his items and thousands of other listings for sanitizer, wipes and face masks. The company suspended some of the sellers behind the listings and warned many others that if they kept running up prices, they’d lose their accounts. EBay soon followed with even stricter measures, prohibiting any U.S. sales of masks or sanitizer.
Now, while millions of people search in vain for hand sanitizer to protect themselves from the spread of the coronavirus, Colvin is sitting on 17,700 bottles of the stuff with little idea where to sell them.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
Modern day entrepreneur ? or knuckleheads out to make a fast buck? The lessons we learn and don’t as we mature.. and don’t.
Good on him. Not like he has the market cornered on water, generators or, God forbid, toilet paper.
I am all for entrepreneurship but this guy is an a-hole.
Master class in how to stretch an anecdotal story to meet a word count. Great example of the hard hitting, impactful stories I’ve come to expect from the NYT.
Why should he be allowed to sell something that’s going to harm people?
So rather than let people get hand sanitizer at a price they’re willing to pay and thus help relieve the shortage, Amazon decides to virtue signal about price gouging.
This isn’t entrepreneurship, it’s some d-bag grabbing items he can’t use himself and trying to price-gouge during a crisis. I hope all of his hand sanitizers reach their expiration date before he can unload any of them. Scum.
He thought Amazon would help him corner the market, he was wrong. Sucks to be him.
Some people might also want to know the source/manufacturer of the “previously owned” personal health & sanitary products.
People like this provide this guy the opportunity. We're not talking necrotizing fasciitis here.
This guy says he's doing a "public service." Unbelievable.
A true Randian. The type that gives capitalism a bad name. That’s why Constitutional Fascism can appear to some to be an attractive middle ground between Randism and Marxism. And why Randism is as inconsistent with Christianity as is Marxism.
Reminds me of some knucklehead I knew who bought several dozen Rolling Stones tickets at face value back in the pre-StubHub days, hoping to make a killing when scalpers were charging 5+ times the face value of the tickets.
The demand was so hot that the Stones added several more dates at the local arena. The "secondary market" ticket prices ended up being even less than face value in many cases.
He can build a Hand Sanitizer Boutique. Or set up a Handazon.com site. Or set up on the side of the road. Not anyone’s problem but his.
> Modern day entrepreneur ? or knuckleheads out to make a fast buck? <
If the story is true, I’d say neither. Given that they went from store to store and cleaned out the shelves, I’d call them human garbage.
Sure, what they did was perfectly legal. But that doesn’t make it morally acceptable.
Our greatest businessmen always have the best lawn furniture.
Put them up for auction on Craigslist.
Or don’t be a douche and only mark up to cover your troubles (expenses) and a reasonable profit.
Now you’ve ruined it for everyone.
Get rich quick schemes seldom work out.
Actually, state governments outright asked Amazon to do this. That news was a while ago but it got lost in everything else going on.
Hand washing protocol at a major clean room hand washing station for a major pharmaceutical company.
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