Scalping exists when there is a discrepancy between a marked price and the market price of an item. If scalpers were not a thing, you would have shortages. With scalpers, you still have shortages, but you can acquire the good by paying a higher, market clearing price.
That higher price either makes it so that rich people can get the thing (most don't like this), or that people who really need it can get it (i.e. lifesaving medication etc). So your view of scalpers might be influenced by the distribution of (1) and (2) going on.
And yes they can suck up profits, that’s their whole thing. Are you saying that profits can’t exist in a functioning market?
The ant planned ahead for the winter, the grasshopper didn’t, and the scalper provides a service to the grasshopper, for a price.
They're taking advantage of some fluxuations to make money for themselves. That isn't helpful for the producer nor for the purchaser of the goods.
This isn't people setting up futures for 555 timers. This is people scooping up PS5s and immediately selling them for an extra $200.
Of course it's nobody's god-given right to own a PS5 but there's not value being produced here.
It's not "waste", it's the people who are willing to spend the most money, which are presumably the people who want/need the thing most, so it's better than allocating the thing at random.
> And why should this involve people spending more money, and all the delta going to the person who was first in line or in lucky position to secure a loan and buy off all the supply?
The person who makes a good judgement about what things are underpriced is selling a service to the market and earning their cut. A seller who's paying attention should see the rush and raise their prices (and ideally increase production to match that).
It’s not a waste, but it’s not best allocation either. It seems like the chips will go to established players with large and cheap credit lines and ossify the market even more.
The scalpers are not like market makers who are regulated, provide both bid and ask, and whose spread is usually quite small in comparison to scalpers.
Credit is cheap, and there's no particular barrier to entry (unless we're talking about things like backroom deals with concert promoters, which I'm sure does happen, but isn't an essential part of the business), so I'd expect this to be a fairly competitive market.
> The scalpers are not like market makers who are regulated, provide both bid and ask, and whose spread is usually quite small in comparison to scalpers.
Market maker regulation is relatively recent, and market making is recognised as having served a beneficial function long before that. Many of these ticket sites do list bid prices for your tickets as well. The spread is pretty wide compared to listed equities that trade hundreds of times a second, sure, but if you compare a single concert's ticket with a stock or bond that trades at a similar rate (which would be, like, the bottom end of the pink sheets) it's not so bad.
The ethics depends on the exact case study provided. If it's a rich person buying an xbox (not price sensitive) - that's one thing, and most people would not support it. If it's someone needing an IC for a heart monitor to stay alive (inelastic demand), most would say that providing them an IC over someone who wants to play the latest video game is a good service.
Scalpers do both (1) and (2).
I’m willing to bet that scalpers starve critical applications of goods far more than they provide them. Providers of critical services are usually poorly funded.
There seems to be an assumption in the discussions about the market that people don't do stupid shit with money. That the same good cannot be both life-critical for one, and a source of cheap entertainment for another. That people only ever spend money to make more money. That they are perfectly consistent over time. That nothing is ever time-critical, it may be only time-discounted.
But the reality is, people are irrational, things take time, and markets have inertia. In a scalper-managed shortage of critical medication, it's perfectly possible for a rich person who watched one too many end-of-the-world movies to buy up the supply at high markup, to stock their fallout shelter, and have it rot there while people who need it die. It takes time for a chip scalper to insert themselves into the market, buy up the supply and advertise their existence - in that time, the factories might be wasting megadollars of money.
True - they also take on some risk of being stuck with inventory that they can't resell at a profit (if prices drop between when they buy and sell).
Ethically scalping feels wrong, but I think ethics aside, scalping does provide a service to the market.