Tends to make a lot of money for a few people until the market inevitably crashes which often puts many of the suppliers out of business.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/business/global/25chocola...
If something is merely priced incorrectly, then someone else can also produce that same good and charge more for it. As a reminder, snatching up everything through automation is not "producing a good", it's market interference.
Scalpers are going to slit their own throats by price gouging Pis. Demand for Pis will dry up if the price stays at $100.
Anti-scalping measures are going to be necessary more and more often as the super-rich diverge from the merely rich and the rich diverge from the poor etc.
There's no such thing as a "correct price". There is a "highest price" that enough people will still pay such that all inventory is sold, but that's not the same thing as being "correct". It depends on what the seller is optimizing for.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation wants their hardware to be sold at particular price points, and they've worked hard to keep costs down so it can be sold at those price points. They've chosen to forego extra profit, with the goal of getting this hardware into as many hands as possible, especially the hands of people who want to learn and may not be able to afford a higher price.
Sure, this isn't consistent with our profit-at-all-costs capitalist culture, but that doesn't make it wrong. And retailers are free to do their best to ensure that these products get into the hands of actual end-users, rather than parasitic, speculative, profiteering scalpers who provide no added value.
In the case of Adafruit, they would much rather have a bunch of satisfied end customers who are able to buy their products and get use out of them, than a bunch of satisfied scalpers. That's their choice (and frankly, I think much better for their business), and it's their right to impose technical measures to try to deny bots from their platform. (They may not always succeed, but that's another matter.)
> If a gas station started selling gasoline at half price, it would be instantly overrun with everyone from Harry with his pickup truck full of jerry cans to empty tanker trucks.
Just like Adafruit is trying to do with bots, that gas station would be well within its rights to refuse to serve tanker trucks or pickup trucks full of gas cans, if their goal in slashing prices was to sell gasoline cheaply to end customers.
Don't these "bots" all have unique payment details?
If a gas station started selling gasoline at half price, it would be instantly overrun with everyone from Harry with his pickup truck full of jerry cans to empty tanker trucks.