That’s just silly. You do realize that the thrift stores could use the VERY SAME APP to price their goods more accordingly, right?
The issue’s on the store for not bothering, not on people for trying to make a buck and using the best tools at their disposal.
This still makes no sense whatsoever. How does “Welcome to English” fit as a response to “Welcome to (city)”? Perhaps you should be the one to brush up on English.
“Authors get paid when consumers … check it out from a library”? Not in the US. I only learned from a thread here that it works that way in the UK.
That’s unpossible!
It makes me wonder whether he was insulting their ethnicity, since it makes no sense otherwise.
Yeah, my guess is that this was in response to someone with an accent that sounded foreign.
I worked at Toys R Us in the 90s for a couple of years. We had an uneasy relationship with collectors. (I’m not sure if they were actual collectors or if they were looking to resell items for a profit, I’m guessing that it’s a mix, since one of my friends did that sort of thing and he was both a collector and a reseller.) Anyway, they were often there at the store waiting for us to open, usually there before we got there to open the store. They’d look at us and the store like hungry dogs waiting for someone at a dinner table to drop a scrap. It was a bit creepy.
As soon as the store opened they would race to the back to look through Hot Wheels, Star Wars figures, Barbie, whatever was collectible. They also knew when we received shipments and there were certain days where you know they’d all show up and be ready (not every single day).
They could sometimes be a bit pushy, pestering us to check the back for items (I often had to tell them that everything we had was on the floor and they rarely believed me). On one occasion I saw a guy in the stockroom and that was definitely not cool and I kicked him out and warned him that I’d let the store director know, and he knew that if he was caught again we’d ban him from the store. He was very apologetic and I don’t remember anything else coming of that.
They bought a lot of stuff and mostly behaved themselves so we didn’t have a big problem with them, but I always thought it was weird that these people seemed to be at the store more than I was, and I freaking worked there.
And even the ones run by charities exist to make money to perform other charitable works, in much the same way as donated cars are not necessarily given directly to people but may be used in an auto repair training class and then sold to make money to provide other services.
Generally, the thrift shop itself is not a charitable function and they are indifferent as to whether rich or poor people buy their goods - the organizations I know that run thrift shops provide vouchers for people in need to buy clothing and/or furniture.
Yeah, when I read:
“pawing all the items”
“loitering”
“welcome to English”
it really does scan like the “wrong kind of people in my bookstore.”
Not that this definitely-reliable narrator is ever going to admit to it…
The excellent “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” novel A Stitch in Time costs $200 used on Amazon because of people like this. No thanks, I’ll get it on Kindle for 99 cents.
This is why the local dealers give numbers to people who arrive in the morning on opening day. I always go later, because the things I buy are often not of interest to many other people, specifically sheet music, for which I always make an offer that they have yet to refuse.
Some of them do. I just hope the lady who runs the self-service bookstore never decides to do this, because she tries to overprice things as it is. Great person, but we’re not running a retail business.
And the purpose of thrift stores is to raise money for the organization, or even the people running it if it isn’t nonprofit.
From what I’ve heard, donated cars (and boats and RVs, if the organization takes them) are usually unrepairable, but they are instead dismantled and sold for parts, or even scrap, and the charity gets the money from that.
This doesn’t make any sense, but it’s a common misconception about scalpers. Scalpers do not create high prices.
It costs $200 because there are a lot of people who want to buy it, and presumably few copies out there to buy. If there weren’t online booksellers scanning thrift store shelves, there would be fewer copies for sale on Amazon because someone else would have bought it for $2 and
Let’s say that there are 1,000 tickets for a venue and 950 tickets are snatched up by scalpers who will resell it at a profit to people who weren’t able to grab a ticket fast enough. This happens often. It also happens to other goods; video game consoles sell out instantly because they are bought up, hoarded, and then sold at a huge markup. Certain goods were bought in bulk during the beginning of the Covid lockdown and then resold at a markup.
When scalpers create scarcity, then yes they are creating high prices.
That may not apply in every case. I don’t think that all copies of a particular used book are being snatched up everywhere by scalpers, so yes in that example the high price is more likely due to the book being out of print for a long time and therefore difficult to acquire. But in many cases scalpers do intentionally raise the price of items by forcing scarcity. They increase their profits in doing so. That’s exactly why people don’t like them.
If the venue had instead sold the tickets in an auction, they would have commanded the same high price the scalpers got, because there were people willing to pay that much.
The high price is the market price. Scalpers (or, middlemen) exploit scenarios where things are sold below market price. In the case of used books, it’s likely because the thrift store doesn’t know the market price. In the case of event tickets, it’s often for other reasons.
But in the case that things are sold below market price, there are other costs. You have to get lucky. You have to know a guy. You have to camp out in front of the box office.
Some people think it’s fun to scour thrift stores for unrecognized deals. Some people treat it as work. I’m rather glad that I can just go pay a little (or a lot) of money for some old out of print book without devoting many hours of my life to hunting through old stacks.
No, that’s not how scalpers work. Scalpers aren’t auctioning these off. They’re not taking bids. They are taking a $50 ticket and charging you $200 for it. They are pretty much guaranteed to not have the same high price at auction. It’s possible there might even be a higher price at an auction then what scalpers are asking for, potentially, but the amount the scalpers are selling aren’t going to match what people are willing to pay, because they are setting the price, not the buyer.
Scalpers aren’t selling things at market price. They are artificially inflating the market price. I know I am oversimplifying (because of course there are always other factors) but the market price of an item is usually a balance between supply and demand. If you can decrease the supply by limiting access to the items then you can increase the market price by making people more desperate for it.
It’s definitely more dramatic for things like tickets where there is by necessity a finite number of items (because you can only sell as many tickets as you have seats), but even for other goods the manufacturer can’t make an infinite amount. So they can still leverage the scarcity to increase the selling price.
But if a scalper can sell tickets for $200 each , then the venue could have sold those tickets for $200 each. The scalper didn’t artificially increase the market price - the venue was selling the tickets below the market price for whatever reason. I have partial season tickets for baseball, and therefore I can buy post-season tickets when they make it. Every time they do, there are a lot of people sitting in my section who weren’t there the rest of the year because the season-ticket holders sold their tickets , usually at a profit. Those people would have been willing to pay the same price directly to the team - but the team would have sold fewer season tickets if they didn’t come with playoff rights.
This Reddit post explains it fairly well in my view. The TL;DR is that while there may be a few desperate fans who are willing to pay $200 for a ticket, most of the venue’s customers don’t. The venue prefers to operate on a large volume and move out all their tickets at $50, rather than spend the effort to identify individual customer preferences to gouge them with max effectiveness.
On the other hand, because the scalpers operate on a smaller volume, they can afford to be more picky about their targets. I also think that if the venues themselves charged scalper prices, they’d immediately get pilloried by the public and lawmakers, and the reputational hit is not worth the extra amount they would make from the inflated prices.
I have a far bigger problem with this than used book sales arbitrage at thrift stores.
Neckbeards going in to poach the collectible stuff at TOY STORES right as they open just means that kids aren’t going to get to play with those toys, just some dickhead manchild who needs a job and a life who’s going to sell them or collect them.
Book sales are something that doesn’t really take away from anyone; it’s not like grown people can’t go buy that stuff themselves at retail or at another used book store. Nobody owes them underpriced books or anything.
Wait…if the authors don’t make any money from the secondary market, then how the hell are the resellers helping them either? Aren’t they buying the books on the secondary market too, not to mention making more money off of said books themselves.
Talk about a really shitty justification.