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 ...
“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.”
That’s how I read this story too.
Give them to people who need it most
The brand is “Pears”.
Yes, it is still around, but they changed the formulation. It used to be one line of ingredients and now it is five. And it’s not nearly as good. Actually it is no good.
Disappointing.
I bought some Pears a few weeks ago and it did not seem at all like I remembered it from years ago. I recall it having a clean, neutral scent. This one was perfumey. Ugh.
He is following the business model established by Leland Stanford during the California gold rush
I would load them in a van and set up shop in a Walmart parking lot
The brothers drove all over Kingdom Come buying products in little out of the way stores where there wasn’t any demand. They moved it to a global market with huge demand. In other words, they are “market makers” literally no different than the commodities futures markets. They were betting on the future price of the commodity changing — it’s the same way oil markets operate.
Why, exactly, is he an a-hole?
It’s sad to see they are so destitute that her clothes have holes in them and she can’t even afford patches to cover the holes. We should take a collection up to aid them and try to ift them out of poverty.
Asshat willing to take advantage of an effective fear campaign...would be poetic if he were to meet for a sale and have the equivalence of a drug deal gone bad.
How much does it cost a one man operation to haul a generator to say...Fort Lauderdale when gas is hard to get and roads are clogged with emergency travelers? Can the guy even get there in a single day?
Your false equivalence relies in part but in its totality upon ignoring the difference in shipping costs under normal circumstances versus shipping costs in a disaster.
Yes, the triple cost for a generator is entirely reasonable but that’s not an equivalent to buying perishables as a disaster hits.
Not that there is a disaster now, just hype.
Cease and desist order by tennesee attorney general
Why sad?
Noah is the titan of his own Tennessee hand sanitizer empire.
He is so wealthy that he can put the fancy furniture in the backyard.
His business acumen is so sound that the New York Times wrote an article about him.
He is the first businessman in the history of the world or at least his Tennessee community to corner the local lucrative hand sanitizer market.
He will go down in history as the Hand Sanitizer Cartel Kingpin.
Collis Potter Huntington saw opportunity blooming in America’s West, set out for California, and established himself as a merchant in Sacramento at the start of the California Gold Rush. Huntington succeeded in his California business, and it was here that he teamed up with Mark Hopkins selling miners’ supplies and other hardware.
When the California Gold Rush began, Hopkins created the “New England Mining and Trading Company”, a group of 26 men each of whom invested $500 to purchase goods and ship them to California for sale. Hopkins arrived in California in 1849. He opened a store in Placerville, California, but it did not succeed and he relocated to Sacramento where he opened a wholesale grocery in 1850. In 1855, Hopkins and Collis Huntington formed “Huntington Hopkins and Company” to operate a hardware and iron business in Sacramento.
Leland Stanford went into business with his brothers and became the keeper of a general store for miners at Michigan City, CA in Placer County; later he had a wholesale house. In 1856, he moved to Sacramento, where he engaged in mercantile pursuits on a large scale.
Who were these price-gouging four merchants buying staples and shovels at low prices in the east and selling them at highly inflated prices to California miners? NONE of them went into prospecting or mining. A few years later they teamed up and built the first transcontinental railroad in the United States.
Everyone or anyone is always in a “crisis.” Either we have price controls, or we have plentiful supply. We can’t have both. Why are there long lines and empty shelves in communist countries?
My wife and I were at Walmart yesterday and there was a long line at the back of the store. The employees were rationing toilet paper. We live in an area where a lot of the new arrivals don’t use much toilet paper... yet here was a long line of them trying to get as much as they could. It was for resale.
We have never used hand sanitizer from the Dollar Store. After what their “Totally Awesome Stain Remover” did to our clothes I am pretty sure that we will not. My wife was amazed at how well the Stain Remover worked until she put the clothes in the washer and they came out with a bunch of holes in them.
This guy should be treated like a looter and summarily executed.
This is exactly the kind of person who will cause the most damage during a real crisis.
As to the toilet paper hoarders, phone books are still free.
And even a mild prepper has a months worth of consumables.
I have a suggestion for the changes we now see in America. It’s called a pantry. Get one and learn how to use it.
Size to suit, rotate stock and only stock what you eat and use. Saves so many “quick trips to the store” its crazy.
The money you will save with an actual shopping list from impulse buying will astound you.
“Modern day entrepreneur ? or knuckleheads out to make a fast buck?”
definitively knuckleheads out to make a fast buck ...
i absolutely detest hoarders and gougers who try to make a fast buck at the expense of the health and well-being of their fellow countrymen and countrywomen during a crisis, especially one in which wide swathes of the countryside has been devastated by floods and/or hurricanes and transportation and other services have been damaged ...
REALLY glad to see these F-heads put out of business and i hope they lose their asses financially ...
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