The Re-seller sucktitude

[ShockQueen]

I witnessed this in a Toys R Us the other day, and really couldn't believe what I was seeing!

It seems this store is a hotbed of activity for eBay re-sellers. They buy mass quantities of in-demand toys just to re-sell them online. They are the worst kind of suck because it makes it to where kids who really want to buy these (or the parents who want to buy them for the kids) not able to buy them for the regular price!

This particular person brought up FOURTEEN "How to Train Your Dragon 2 Ultimate Battle Set" playsets and wanted to buy them all. Come on....really? This guy looked way too young to have THAT many kids, and it just reeked of suspicion.

The manager on duty (THANK YOU!) told him that they would not sell him all fourteen as they were "hot ticket items" and only allowed him to buy 4 of them.

I mean come on......there is a reason why there is a limit on some purchases after all. It's no wonder some things are so hard to find in stores with people like this!

[siskaren]

I think even 4 was too many to have allowed; he should've been only allowed one.

[Slayer]

I've bought 30 of the same toy before to give to students at the end of the year, but they were $1 items. 14 expensive items is definitely odd.

[fireheart]

Agreed.

We started setting up policies at the supermarket I worked at where we started limiting the number of hot-ticket items. While we didn't mind people who would mass-buy other items, the hot-ticket items we had to put a cap on. (We did have a couple of people who would come in and buy a lot of things for not-for-profit organisations such as local football clubs. THEY weren't the issue. The issue was the number of people who would buy this stuff only to sell it in their local deli a few weeks later.)

[RealUnimportant]

I bought one of the (then new) Lego BTTF DeLoreans from Toys R Us last year, and while queuing I checked Amazon just to be sure I wasn't ripping myself off... Turned out they were already being resold for 50% more than I was paying in-store!

I was tempted to buy a couple more to resell myself, then thought about how much I hate seeing that kind of profiteering & felt it better to simply be happy that I'd outsmarted them this time.

[Monterey Jack]

I really hate how people only buy/hoard items for speculative purposes. The Twilight Time label releases 3,000-copy limited pressings of certain movies on Blu-Ray, and it's bad enough they jack up the price to an absurd $30 (not even counting shipping) per movie, but even worse when it's any sort of cult 80's horror movie (Fright Night, Christine), because it's GUARANTEED to sell out within a day or two before eBay and Amazon is flooded with "still sealed!" copies selling for $100 a pop...usually two or three copies per seller.

[LillFilly]

My sister did that with tickle me elmos and xboxes; only she made sure to shaft people for $50 shipping too. She lost her ebay account for her poor feedback, and tried to convince ME to sell the stuff for her on MINE. Uh...no.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

My sister did that with tickle me elmos and xboxes; only she made sure to shaft people for $50 shipping too. She lost her ebay account for her poor feedback, and tried to convince ME to sell the stuff for her on MINE. Uh...no.

I might've taken her up on that. If and only if I got to keep all the proceeds.

[drjonah]

I remember when the Wii first came out. A guy actually camped outside of Awful-mart for 24 hours to be first in line to get a Wii. Of course then he brags while he's checking out that he's just turning right around and selling it on Ebay for $1000

[EricKei]

Hey, it could be worse -- Anybody remember when the original XBOX came out, and someone successfully eBayed an XBOX box for fat cash? That's right, just the empty box it came in. They had to make a whole new policy because of him...

[Crossbow]

Probably not the worst, but certainly high on the list, are Disney pin collectors. I love collecting and have gone to one (soon to be two) of the official trading events at WDW, by OMG, these people are insane! A pin with a limited run of 1000 and they're fighting to get as many as they can, just to put them on eBay hours later. Hell, half the time they're for sale on eBay before they actually are available from Disney!

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

I seem to recall that when the Nintendo Wii first came out, ebay refused to release money to sellers selling Wiis before the release date until they provided proof of shipment.

So some guy got the idea to pre-sell a bunch of Wiis, write a letter to each buyer thanking them for their purchase, send those out with tracking, and ebay released the money to him.

Pretty sure this was nipped in the bud quickly. At least I hope it was.

[Silent-Hunter]

Why on EARTH do these people not buy them from the manufacturer to do this sort of thing? Surely that would be cheaper, since they want them in bulk.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Why on EARTH do these people not buy them from the manufacturer to do this sort of thing? Surely that would be cheaper, since they want them in bulk.

Unless you have things like an irrevocable line of credit from a bank, a physical storefront, and the ability to order in the millions of units, manufacturers and wholesalers will not give you the time of day.

[mikoyan29]

This was one of the things I hated about collecting Star Wars figures for about the first 3 or 4 years when the Power of the Force line came out.