They started buying it up after the first US death. Then Amazon and Ebay shut them down for price-gouging.
I’m sure these pillars of the community will donate all their supplies, right? Right?
They should probably be in jail right now. I’m sure we have some old war-time laws still on the books to cover this.
Their rationalization is warped, twisted.
I hope they get a run of really hot weather, and all the containers fail.
Karma’s a bitch!
~VOW
There is a War Profiteering Prevention Act but as the name suggests, it only applies to profiteering directly related to war, and its scope is pretty narrow.
Frankly, I think these asshole got exactly what they deserved anyway. They tried to scam the community and now they are themselves out at least $25K and will be regarded as scum for the rest of their lives.
There’s legal action against them now.
There’s legal action against them now.
Awesome.
It’s the craven greed that gets you – had they very early on just bought a whole bunch from a wholesaler at wholesale prices, then put in a high but within-reasonable-bounds margin, it may have coasted through. Cleaning out the retail shelves and then wanting to collect a big windfall at 8X to 20X mark-up… that comes back to bite you in the fundament.
(BTW now I wonder if they were collecting sales tax on shipments to their own state…)
The irony is, I have no problem is stores raised their prices on existing stocks to prevent panic-buying. (I’m sure people would rather pay double price for toilet paper than have none with the all the crazies grabbing massive stocks of it.) But these losers, and others like them, are making it impossible for ordinary people to get any of these life-saving items. At the same time, they’re not making it easier for people who really need them to get the items, but rather making it much slower and more difficult (just in case any believed their excuses).
I have a different opinion related to anti-gouging laws where there’s been a natural disaster, as I think that’s ineffective and self-defeating.
According to the original NYT piece is is now looking for a way to donate it, after being shut out of Amazon and the publicity. (And possibly after googling the word “gibbet.”)
Non-paywalled Daily Mail article. Turns out that dipshit was so stupid that he did the NYT piece because he thought people would sympathize with him as The Little Guy crushed by Big Bad Amazon:
There is no hand sanitizer in any store near me but I am hundreds if not over 1000 miles from where they did their buying spree. Do you think those stores would be repackaging it, sending it back to their warehouse & then reshipping it to my area if these two hadn’t bought it out?
They saw an opportunity & front ran the market; they started their buying spree on March 1st for hand sanitizer, & other stuff before that, before anyone was really talking about it. Their stupidity, like many before them & no doubt many after them was in talking about it, as well as charging exorbitant prices. If they had just quietly started reselling it on amazon & ebay for a reasonable price & not bragged on social media, or to the press do you think they’d have the notoriety that they do now?
Retail arbitrage is a thing & he’s been doing it for years now. If you read the NYT article, he makes a 6-figure income from selling on Amazon.
A rich piece of shit is still a piece of shit. And scaplers are utterly worthless pieces of shit.
He’s probably trying to game his “charitable” deduction. Any organization that’s willing to give him a receipt valuing each bottle at $70 gets the lot.
Yup.
LOL, I wondered why he was willing to have his name and photo published.
- He wasn’t the only one, just the only one who was dumb enough to go public.
- He also bought from Amazon, so he was also buying up product that you could have purchased.
- I’m fine with retail arbitrage, if you are actually moving stuff from low-value to high-value. I’m not fine with creating an artificial shortage by buying up all the stock in advance of an expected catastrophe. It’s the difference between shipping plywood into Florida right before a Hurricane to sell at a nice profit after, and buying up all the plywood you can find that’s already in Florida, and then charging an extortionate price.
I mentioned this last night (March 14) in the Breaking News thread. You read it there first!
The affected states may knock the bejeebers out of him for not collecting sales tax or not possessing a resale license.
I still think container failure, with his garage/storage unit knee deep in sanitizer is just reward.
~VOW
This sounds like something the It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia gang would do. Except that the fail would have happened earlier in the process.
Mr. Colvin, the Tennessee guy with the 17,000+ bottles of sanitizer that he can’t sell, donated his entire stock.
A local church took 2/3 of his stock to pass out among the needy. The Tennessee AG took the other 1/3 to deliver to Kentucky, where Colvin apparently bought some of his stock in the first place.
The Tennessee AG, in addition, is investigating. Presumably, looking into some kind of prosecution.
Colvin has been inundated with hate mail, death threats, delivered pizzas he didn’t order, and has obviously been thoroughly doxxed. Haters gonna hate! 
(Even in a case like this, we among the civilized can argue that people shouldn’t be doing things like that, right?.)
Story at Yahoo: The Man With 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer Just Donated Them, Jack Nicas, New York Times, March 16, 2020.
If the following is true, it suggests that he really was that tone-deaf but has now heard the music:
Yep. Shit has consequences.