I no longer care about scalpers at all

[Real_Smoky]

Unpopular opinion: 2-3 years into the big bad C and silicon shortage market conditions, I honestly don't care at all about scalpers.

That's how the free market works. GPUs are not essential like water or food, so everyone has the right to buy them for however much they want and sell them for however much the market can bear.

I don't even care about the "unfair" bots who buy cards because somebody has to have paid for the bots or developed them, so somebody did the work every one of us was free to do as well, we just didn't.
 

[Brooksie359]

Yep gotta love capitalism. Screw other people over in the name of profit because who cares about other people. It's why tickets to live events have been basically impossible to sell at a reasonable price. I'm sorry but scalpers provide little value to society other than inflated prices on scarce products. Sure the only person that really benefits from scalpers is the rich who can afford the price hike as it ensures they is stock left that they cN buy even if it is an inflated one. Me I prefer when it was first come first serve and you just had to be lucky to get a product rather than people cheating the system with bots. 

[Real_Smoky]

3 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

Yep gotta love capitalism. Screw other people over in the name of profit because who cares about other people. It's why tickets to live events have been basically impossible to sell at a reasonable price. I'm sorry but scalpers provide little value to society other than inflated prices on scarce products. Sure the only person that really benefits from scalpers is the rich who can afford the price hike as it ensures they is stock left that they cN buy even if it is an inflated one. Me I prefer when it was first come first serve and you just had to be lucky to get a product rather than people cheating the system with bots. 

I mean, companies also work for profit. You might feel a company pricing their product for X instead of Y is screwing you over, but the company has workers and the workers have families. If they charged Y instead of X, they would be screwing over their workers. Similarly, scalpers might have family members to feed. 

Late-stage capitalism has a lot of problems. This ain't one of them, I think.

Tickets sell at what the market can bear. Scalpers always invest into something and thus risk losing their money. It's in no way different than investing in the stock market or into crypto. 


Bots are not "cheating the system", they are part of the system, you just don't know how to get hold of a bot or don't want to use them because of your own personal and subjective ethical reasons.

 

[NF-A12x25]

18 minutes ago, Real_Smoky said:

I don't even care about the "unfair" bots who buy cards because somebody has to have paid for the bots or developed them, so somebody did the work every one of us was free to do as well, we just didn't.

you do realize that the same argument could be made for literally any morally bankrupt thing people do on the free market? In some places it is legal to sell children into slavery or worse. That is a function of the free market. Just because something is a function of the free market does not mean it is ethical.

 

Quote

You might feel a company pricing their product for X instead of Y is screwing you over, but the company has workers and the workers have families.

It’s not screwing me over, it’s screwing the worker over. The worker does not realize the surplus value of their labor, which instead directly enriches the bourgeois class. Labor theory of value, baby

[Real_Smoky]

4 minutes ago, NF-A12x25 said:

you do realize that the same argument could be made for literally any morally bankrupt thing people do on the free market? In some places it is legal to sell children into slavery or worse. That is a function of the free market. Just because something is a function of the free market does not mean it is ethical.

 
I don't think someone not getting their RGB RTX 6990 GT TI and child labor are comparable. That's like comparing your childhood bully calling you fat to Gitler. 

Child labor kills children, destroys their potential, cripples their education, scars them mentally and handicaps them physically. Scalping GPUs does none of that. 

 

[NF-A12x25]

1 minute ago, Real_Smoky said:

I don't think someone not getting their RGB RTX 6990 GT TI and child labor are comparable. That's like comparing your childhood bully calling you fat to Gitler. 

I’m simply saying the argument is somewhat unsound as it can be applied to other, even worse activities. Scalping is at best morally grey as it harms people who need a product- not all of whom will use it frivolously. Not saying you have to care about it, just the ethics surrounding it are not really pure.

[Birblover12]

I feel like it's as they say in Sweden, "bara för att du kan betyder det inte att du borde". Or in English, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should". That summarizes this post pretty well.

 

I agree that scalping as a concept is just how basic economics works. Have a popular product with loads of demand but very little supply? The price will skyrocket, since who doesn't like making money?

 

However, the issue comes with how scalpers operate. Using things like bots just screws everyone else over. When I log into BestBuy at 6:00 AM, I expect to have an equal chance at getting whatever product is being released as everyone else. Sure, you now have 500 RTX 3080s. Nice, now what happens is the company has to put in place "1 per address" type policies, so if someone theoretically wanted to get one as a gift for a friend if they were so lucky to buy one? Sorry, someone else got greedy and now you have to pay the price, literally and figuratively.

 

Scalping, as a whole, is just a mess of scummy ethics. Generally, the people who support scalping are scalpers themselves, since they're literally the only ones who profit from it. If people just wait, scalpers lose all motivation and move on. But, by purchasing from scalpers, they're only given ample opportunity to keep taking advantage of people's hobbies and the things they enjoy simply for financial gain.

 

At the end of the day, it's your money. Spend it on whatever you want, we ultimately cannot stop you. Not sure what you seek to accomplish in a tech forum saying you support the very thing that's the bane of our existence, but you do you. Just try putting yourself in other people's shoes and realize how sucky it is for them, and rethink the whole idea.

[Thaldor]

7 minutes ago, Real_Smoky said:

I mean, companies also work for profit. You might feel a company pricing their product for X instead of Y is screwing you over, but the company has workers and the workers have families. If they charged Y instead of X, they would be screwing over their workers. Similarly, scalpers might have family members to feed.

There is big difference. While scalpers can have all the same financial problems as a company they lack one huge thing: Public humiliation, consumer rights and public "forced" competition.

 

Public humiliation, if a company goes under because they overpriced their product and ended up with millions of products rotting in a warehouse and no one to buy them, the CEO most probably isn't going to get another chair to sit on quite soon. Meanwhile for a scalper, just take another burner email and create another ebay account and back to the business without anyone being able to directly tell what they did in the past. Scalpers don't even need to pay for the admission fees for the paperwork to get their new business running and when they start the first person behind the door isn't the tax officials (more or less most of the scalpers work in the grey area without paying the taxes they would need to pay if they ran completely legal business, and legal as paying their taxes, at the best they probably just pay the income taxes and none of the VATs and other business related taxes, leave alone other fees that come with running a business like official retirement funds (where needed), official accounting, sometimes even required business insurances and other things that come when you are running a business and not a single person selling "small" quantities of "needless" stuff with "barely any" profits).

 

Consumer rights. Most likely the scalper walking to a bank to get a loan to buy a batch of products to scalp isn't going there as a company which means they have certain protections. If the scalper doesn't pay their loans off on time, the bank doesn't bring down brimstone and fires of hell to them because they are a consumer customer and the bank legally cannot just walk to the judge and say that "person X owes us this much, they didn't pay it by date Y, we demand them to be bankrupt and cease their operations until they have paid their dues. Their bank accounts, funds and assets are to be frozen, they cannot even pay or send out a banana until their dues have been sorted out." They can take a consumer to a court over unpaid bills but it isn't anywhere close as brutal as in the business world where certain organizations almost can just walk to your operations, order everyone out and change the locks until the company has sorted their financial problems out.

 

"Forced" competition. Scalpers often do not have any hurry or pressure to sell anything at the price they do not like to sell. There's so many scalpers that they can all just wait and not sell their stuff if the prices are too low for them and there is little to no need for them to get the product sold right then and there unless they have being stupid and loaned the money to get the product and they don't have another job. mainly no one is pushing them to sell their products in fear of loosing the market or investors demanding results or any really forcing them to get products moving with at least some profit and at the worst at some price with which they can keep the lights on (unless the scalper is stupid and does the stuff as their primary income).

[TetraSky]

Good for you.

[Avocado Diaboli]

2 hours ago, Real_Smoky said:

GPUs are not essential like water or food, so everyone has the right to buy them for however much they want and sell them for however much the market can bear.

What makes essential things different that precludes them from being justifiably scalped under free market capitalism? And don't say "because they're essential", put a bit more thought into your argument, please. If your argument against Nesté buying up water sources and jacking up the price has anything to do with water being necessary for life but GPUs and concert tickets not, then you don't have very strong principles. That, or you've pivoted into scalping something yourself and this thread is just a way to appease your guilty conscience.

[wasab]

Inherent contradiction of the free market is that its ultimate goal is a drive towards anti competitiveness. The goal of every single business is to crush the competitions and create a monopoly and in the process generate as much profit as possible for a few individuals. It is like a pyramid scheme in that there will always be some elite few at the top earning a lion share. It’s entire incentive structure is purely stack against general societal and public welfare. 

 

anyone who says it is a free market as if it is some benevolent forces need to chill. It is how free market works but how is that anymore a justification of like say serfdom by pointing to that’s just how feudalism works! Well yeah…. But…. Why? Scalper is just exploitive parasite in the supply chain. They have no moral right to exist.

[Guest]

[Imbadatnames]

Like how you post this AFTER we’ve come out of the shortage. You can literally buy FE of cards from Nvidia at MSRP or less now, 3090Tis are like half of MSRP. Most of the scalpers at the back end are losing money hand over fist because they’ve bought 3090’s etc at 2K and they’re going on eBay for 700-900

[Imbadatnames]

33 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

What makes essential things different that precludes them from being justifiably scalped under free market capitalism? And don't say "because they're essential", put a bit more thought into your argument, please. If your argument against Nesté buying up water sources and jacking up the price has anything to do with water being necessary for life but GPUs and concert tickets not, then you don't have very strong principles. That, or you've pivoted into scalping something yourself and this thread is just a way to appease your guilty conscience.

I would say internet and mobile phone plans are basically essential now. Doesn’t stop the providers of both colluding to pump up prices. Literally insane for you guys in the US, $50 for one month on unlimited on a sim only? I only pay £35 and I get that plus a fuckton of extras including 25GB a month free in the US.

[wasab]

12 minutes ago, Imbadatnames said:

Like how you post this AFTER we’ve come out of the shortage. You can literally buy FE of cards from Nvidia at MSRP or less now, 3090Tis are like half of MSRP. Most of the scalpers at the back end are losing money hand over fist because they’ve bought 3090’s etc at 2K and they’re going on eBay for 700-900

The free market gives and the free market takes. Karma

[Imbadatnames]

47 minutes ago, wasab said:

The free market gives and the free market takes. Karma

Don’t really think a duopoly is a free market tbh, especially when there’s no chance of someone coming in to disrupt it. I mean Intel have tried bless them but even someone as big as them failed massively 

[Brooksie359]

5 hours ago, Real_Smoky said:

I mean, companies also work for profit. You might feel a company pricing their product for X instead of Y is screwing you over, but the company has workers and the workers have families. If they charged Y instead of X, they would be screwing over their workers. Similarly, scalpers might have family members to feed. 

Late-stage capitalism has a lot of problems. This ain't one of them, I think.

Tickets sell at what the market can bear. Scalpers always invest into something and thus risk losing their money. It's in no way different than investing in the stock market or into crypto. 


Bots are not "cheating the system", they are part of the system, you just don't know how to get hold of a bot or don't want to use them because of your own personal and subjective ethical reasons.

 

This is extremely hilarious as 99% of the time that extra money that companies make from milking the absolute most out of its customers never ends up in the hands of the average workers but instead goes to the executives and shareholders. Stupid ideas like this is what allowed the pharmaceutical companies to rationalize selling insulin at 10x the cost in the US which resulted in the deaths of thousands of people with diabetes because they couldn't afford insulin. Insulin is super cheap to make and the manufacturing process was the result of research of a university in Canada so its not like the companies are trying to recoup the research cost or producing insulin. They are just making use of the fact that people will buy insulin regardless of the price as if they don't they die. It's also the reason why when the us goverment funded the research for a new treatment for covid said company then sold that new treatment to the government for 700 dollars a pop when it cost 17 dollars to make. Like we pay for the research to make the damn thing but then they go ahead and sell the product we funded the development of for way more than what it cost to make. We already paid for the research so there is 0 reason why they should be able to sell it at that ridiculous price but again it's supply and demand and the free market at work. 

[NF-A12x25]

6 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

This is extremely hilarious as 99% of the time that extra money that companies make from milking the absolute most out of its customers never ends up in the hands of the average workers but instead goes to the executives and shareholders.

someone said something like this a while ago… this guy named Karl. He was right.

[Motifator]

*In Call of Duty Shephard's voice* Welcome to the free market sale, if you survive you earn your card.

Yeah the argument here seems, they do it, so why should I not? Something like that... just because somebody does something immoral, and others do it, doesn't make it more moral.

[Imbadatnames]

47 minutes ago, Motifator said:

*In Call of Duty Shephard's voice* Welcome to the free market sale, if you survive you earn your card.

Yeah the argument here seems, they do it, so why should I not? Something like that... just because somebody does something immoral, and others do it, doesn't make it more moral.

Eye for an eye makes the whole world blind 

[GreatnessRD]

I've always had the stance that I can't fault scalpers because people in the world have that "Gotta have it" mentality. So if there is some poor fool who wants to buy a product off you for double, triple the price, don't hate the player hate the game. If people didn't buy things at stupid prices, stupid prices wouldn't exist. Make that scalper sit on his $2,000 3090 Ti he thought he would sell for $4,000 and watch the price drop <removed by staff>

Edited October 20, 2022 by SansVarnic
Removed content.

[Neroon]

Fuck scalpers. Why? Because they contribute nothing to society.

 

Every company wants to make a profit, and while we can argue all day long about how much profit is reasonable etc, at the end we can all agree that companies are supposed to make profit.

To make profit they offer a product and/or service. So if we take a PS5, Sony has to develop a product, which they absolutely don't do alone, they develop the software, get them in the hands of game and app developers, market it, maintain an online service etc etc 

Now whether you think it's overpriced or not, or too expensive doesn't matter, because at the end of the day, they made something and you can buy it, that's the transaction.

 

Then scalpers come in, they sell up stuff, they at least partially create a shortage of products, they resell it for higher prices, while not contributing anything to development or creation of the product, they just raise the prices for their own gain, while offering nothing in return. And before you argue that you get a PS5 in return, well you could have bought for less if they hadn't, so that price on top offers you nothing.

 

So how is that different from say Lego sets that are bought and held for say 10 years to sell at a huge profit?

Well aside from the obvious long term storage costs, the fact is that Lego wouldn't be offering it anymore regardless, I think products are usually only sold for like 3-5 years, and aside from some poss8ble shortages the first few months, they get in stock very quickly, and anyone wanting to buy it at retail, absolutely can.

 

To be clear, with scalping I'm talking about people who bought the product with the express purpose to sell it for more. Someone selling their used PS5 at a profit because they needed the money, don't really game anymore or for whatever reason, is fine.

 

I can go extreme with this example, by saying that you make a deal with someone to buy say a motherboard, you go to their house to pick it up, and right when their door opens, someone swoops in, pays the owner of the board the price, and then wants you to pay 50% more.

 

I say fuck those people, get a job and do something useful, no one wants you.

[Sauron]

10 hours ago, Real_Smoky said:

That's how the free market works.

It's literally not, people creating a cottage industry around two companies holding a duopoly over the entire market and unilaterally deciding how much of the product is made is the opposite of a free market. It's the natural conclusion to a "free market" but it's not the way it's supposed to work. It's a symptom of broader problems in our economic system that stuff like this keeps happening.

10 hours ago, Real_Smoky said:

I mean, companies also work for profit. You might feel a company pricing their product for X instead of Y is screwing you over, but the company has workers and the workers have families. If they charged Y instead of X, they would be screwing over their workers. Similarly, scalpers might have family members to feed. 

Late-stage capitalism has a lot of problems. This ain't one of them, I think.

This is not at all how companies or scalpers work. Most profits do not go to workers and if a company makes more money than expected it's as likely as not that workers will be laid off the following year to give stakeholders the impression of continuous growth. Also consider that I could make the same argument for thieves as you are for scalpers; after all thieves have families to feed too.

 

And yes, it IS a problem with capitalism that pricing for stuff is arbitrarily inflated for the end user while the workers who produced that stuff get none of the extra profit.

[Moonzy]

you're doing it wrong

you voiced your opinion at where the opinion is not welcomed and you can easily be overwhelmed

what i suggest you do is just screw them over by participating in the scalping yourself, then you'll have the advantage over them

[Real_Smoky]

10 hours ago, Birblover12 said:

Sorry, someone else got greedy and now you have to pay the price....

 

 

No, you don't.