I’m not sure if I care that much what OP sells, but definitely ridiculous to not say what it is.
We’re a retailer in the fashion industry.
If society fails and you wind up surviving in a cabin in the woods, you’re probably not taking our stuff along with you.
Great question.
Our prices are within 5% of our legitimate competition, so I’d be pretty shocked if anyone was reselling our product.
The challenge of this sort of restriction is not that it’s illegal, but that it might look like an illegal restriction and be challenged. If you cut someone off who thinks that it’s because of their membership in a protected class, even if that thought is entirely within their own mind and has, you potentially have to defend against a lawsuit.
That means having all your ducks in a row, having a clearly documented policy and applying it consistently. And even then you might have to pay lawyers a lot of money to demonstrate those things in court.
And what if it turns out your policy wasn’t really applied consistently? You can write all the memos you want, but if it turns out some of your salespeople/customer service people are racists/sexists/whatever-ists and just use that policy to punish people they don’t like. Oy. That’s very bad.
Is that risk worth it to you?
What are you selling? Crack??
“Hoarding” implies to me that you are acquiring stuff that you don’t use immediately and will probably never use (although you keep it because you think you might use it some day). Do you think they are buying clothes they never wear, but just store them away immediately? Or are they a fashion enthusiast, who buys something and wears it just once?
The first is fairly nuts. The second may be profligate, but they are choosing to spend their money on what might be seen as a kind of hobby. Also, while it might be unlikely given the depreciation on used clothes, they could be mitigating the financial impact somewhat by selling the clothes used or donating them and claiming a tax benefit.
I don’t know what the rules are over your way but over here, bartenders are not allowed to sell you alcohol to someone who is drunk. Cite (scroll down to Appendix 2).
Hoarding to me just implies you’re buying stuff and not throwing it away. The mark of a hoarder is that you have less and less free space as time goes on because you have a lot of stuff that you should be throwing away. The dodgy part of this analysis is defining “what you should be throwing away” - debates can be had on that. ‘Obvious’ hoarders are the ones that keep stacks of ancient fast food packaging, but by some perspectives any collector counts as a hoarder, be they collecting coins or bottle caps or baseball cards or mint-in-box toys or ceramic cats or (yes) designer clothes. Anybody can point at a person’s possessions and say “you should throw that crap out”, and the ‘hoarder’ will disagree - even if the hoarder has so much stuff they’re running out of space.
Perhaps interestingly as far as the OP is concerned, I don’t consider spending beyond your means to be indicative of a hoarder - that’s just somebody who doesn’t know how to budget. Hoarding isn’t about how much you buy; it’s about how much you keep.
It’s usually a combination of the two.
I have a “friend” that sells on a famous internet retailer. What I’ve learned from them is that everything being taught in Econ 101 that was once considered Gospel is brought into question on a daily basis.
What fuzzy info I can mine from them indicates they have stumbled on a business model that both is completely unsustainable, yet would be the envy of Ponzi and Madoff.
All that money I spent on business school was wasted. :o
Though note what isn’t on there; any kind of definition of the word ‘drunk’. Defining that is wholly left to the barstaff or establishment, until the police or inspectors decide they have a different definition and you just broke the law.
It is an intriguing OP. For the life of me, I can’t work out what the OP is selling to the hoarders.
He feels that the buyers could use $120 worth of the product a week and not be hoarding. But they are buying $600 worth and hoarding the remainder.
I can’t think of any consumable product that I would buy $120 worth of each and every week other than food.
He said he’s a retailer in the fashion industry, so I presume he is selling clothes or shoes.
What I can’t figure out, is how he knows how much income his customers make
Hmm… is the customer Imelda Marcos? 
The early days of EBay was about the same time as one of the Star Wars prequel movies was released in the theaters. I saw an article in which the journalist described seeing a husband-and-wife couple each going into Target, buying up as many Star Wars action figures as the sales restriction permitted, putting them in the back of the car and then doing back into the store to do it all over again. The journalist asked what they were doing and it turned out the plan was to put them up for sale on EBay starting at twice the retail price. They’d sell as many as they could and whatever didn’t sell, they would just return to the store for a refund. I marveled at the idea that you could make money by buying stuff at retail prices and reselling it online. (This sometimes still goes on, particularly when the store sells only a limited quantity of goods but the Star Wars toys were widely available.) Perhaps that’s what the buyer in the OP is doing here? Perhaps the merchandise is unavailable or more expensive overseas and they’re selling there?
He said the fashion industry, so I assume clothes.
Even then it doesn’t make sense. He mentions that they “only need $6,000 a year” of the product.
Who needs $6,000 a year in clothes?
ETA: I guess they could be purchasing for a family, not an individual.
There are handbags that go for $6k, and social groups within which such things are considered a necessity. The CEO’s wife probably spends $800 to $3k on her dress for the company Christmas party. And the shoes for that outfit could be $300 to $1k as well.
I don’t personally get into all that, but I was raised to, and did well into my 20’s. It’s ridiculous, but not pathological.
Nah… one thing I remember from business school is that there’s inevitably a correction of some sort in the market.
I also started business school in August 2002- in the midst of the Dot-com bubble bursting, and the MBA curriculum was more or less centered around the “new economy”, which turned out to be a highly entertaining series of professors either grumping about how they knew it was BS all along, middle-of-the-road ones talking about what actually was happening/had just happened, and a very few true believers who were still convinced that the fundamental business theories had been fundamentally changed by the internet, and that what we were seeing was a transient blip.
I suspect your friends are seeing something akin to that bubble; they’re probably in some sort of business model that’s enabled by the retailer because it furthers their goals for now, but isn’t the long term plan. And when they switch, your friends will be left in the lurch.
As for the OP, I’m curious how they get from being a fashion retailer to hoarders. AFAIK, hoarders don’t typically load up on clothes and fashion items.
I’m with SmartAleq- I suspect there’s some arbitrage going on and that you need to raise your prices some.
I used to watch the show Hoarders for the lift of “now I don’t feel so bad about waiting a week to throw out the junk mail”. Lots of people on that show had huge batches of clothes still in store packaging or bearing price tags that they were never going to wear but wouldn’t part with; dresses, shirts, hats, pants, handbags, shoes, any of it could end up as part of the pile. Hoarders definitely do load up on clothes, and it’s often in standard lists like “Commonly hoarded items may be newspapers, magazines, paper and plastic bags, cardboard boxes, photographs, household supplies, food, and clothing.”
I do agree that the person is likely reselling or otherwise getting use from the clothes, though.