To expand a little bit on your comment: The reason that scalpers =/= retail is that initial retail sellers are at the end of the wholesale supply chain, which is the huge logistical market we rely on. Retail scalpers create an uneeded secondary supply chain that's even more exclusive than wholesale. This wasn't nearly the issue it is today until scalpers learned how to code.

Now businesses have no incentive to mitigate the supply issues scalpers introduce because they get a whole host of benefits (guaranteed rapid ROI, simplified logistics or dispatch, reliable product cycles). It's a big part of why you see so many brands going to small 'limited edition' drops/releases lately. Being able to reliably produce known quantities of product that you can be sure of selling 100% reduces depreciation, improves your attractiveness to your vendors and shortens your manufacturing chain.

You can get a single shipment that contains all the materials needed for a given run, without having to source reliable long-term suppliers. Plus if you cant find a certain material at that moment, you can re-tool for what you can find easily (smaller production = smaller production lines = fewer machines) with much less initial outlay. Keeping several designs being prepared at once also means you're much more flexible to supply issues / machine downtime / etc.

There's a ton more perks, as well, but you get the idea.

The tradeoff is that your setup costs are higher and more frequently incurred, but thats pretty easy to mitigate down to near triviality with good management. Also that it's very tricky to get into this position, and if you're relying on FOMO an unpopular product release can take years to finally move all the units.

So what I'm saying is scalpers suck massively and we'd better get used to them because nobody wants to get rid of them except consumers, and fuck consumers amirite c-suite lads?

Globalization wouldn't be as attractive if man in the middle incentive didn't factor into cost of goods sold. Vertical integration (take apple for example) can address that, but it introduced other problems. And globalization as a whole is mostly a good thing.

There's a difference between logistics and some cunt buying out all the toilet paper at wal-mart so they can sell it on Craigslist.

This is about scalpers. (Which includes Ticketmaster.)

During the height of the pandemic many scalpers were claiming that they were a crucial part of capitalism. That what they were doing was important for the economy.

Dear ‘capitalists’ who keep using this excuse to defend what they do: Distribution is different from scalping. One has legitimate costs for what you suggested to keep a brick and mortar business running. The other is fleecing without cost and it’s not exactly for the altruistic reason of ‘just surviving’ nor is it interested in anyone else’s ability to survive. It is the unchecked reason why the planet is in the hole now.

There is a subtle, but fundamental, difference between being a distributor - someone who buys in bulk at Location X and sells retail at Location Y - and a monopoly/cartel - an individual or group that takes control of a critical point in the supply chain and then operates as a monopoly reseller at enormous mark-ups to everyone downstream.

The general distinction is in the degree of markup that your position provides. For inelastic goods/services (staple foods/energy/medical/emergency services) and opportunity-limited services (concert tickets/first-edition prints and collectibles) you can capitalize in a sudden spike in demand to raise prices astronomically.

No better example of this than the Texas electricity grid. Natural Gas power providers run a cartel in our state which allows them to limit how much electricity they generate during periods of peak usage. So when the weather starts cresting 100° and electric demand for A/C peaks, they can charge upwards of $3000/Mwh for electricity that was trading at $15-20/Mwh hours earlier.

If I see you at Best Buy, trying to clear the shelf of the latest widget so you can upsell it at your boutique venue for 3x the sticker price, I'm still going to believe you're going straight to extra hell.

If I see you on Temu or Aliexpress, picking up specialty hardware in bulk and then undercutting Best Buy right next door, I'll put a word in with St. Peter when you get to the Pearly Gates.

Good luck with that. But there's practically no money in hardware. We sell things, and our suppliers can't get it to us in bulk for the same price you can pick it up on Amazon. Our customers are technophobes who only buy from us so they can ring us up when they can't plug it in.

Custom software and services are the only places we make money.

Brick and mortar is rapidly dying... Especially for computer hardware. Look at circuit City, radio shack, best buy... They're either dying or dead. Make sure your market research is really solid!

THERE WAS A DEMAND, I AM MEETING A DEMAND!

ALSO, I CREATED THE DEMAND. OOPS.

Depends of how they make a profit.

By voluntary exchange in a free-market setting? They're serving consumer needs and, by consequence, doing a societal good.

By using government-grant privileges to smash the competence? Nope. They're doing more harm than good.

Taking advantage of you excess resources to manipulate people into give you theirs, is the problem.