If you want pallets of baby strollers, or even a specific model/type of stroller, for refurbishing or whatever - the retailers want you to go direct to them. They'll happily sell direct to you, but you need to buy a truckload or more at a time.
So much for right of First Sale I suppose. Or has licensing so pervasively invaded our economic system that there isn't even the pretense of an equitable position in mercantile activity anymore?
Honestly, the further I dig into modern colloquial business practice, the more and more it appears everything is predicated on bad faith from the supply side from the start.
If pallets normally bring say $100 each but by letting the stroller lady consolidate the strollers into one pallet that she'll pay $250 for, everybody won.
All of the other places are cherry picking and reorganizing pallets to elicit higher bids and tend to run their own parallel retail / resale operations. It's probably necessary though because the guy selling directly off the truck went out of business last year.
I’ve looked at many founders I considered successful, and they all had some card to play that others either: no longer could because the law changed, a relationship nobody else had, or was outright illegal but didn’t matter
I would say that there are no rules, only consequences. Or, the consequences are the rule.
I've been chewing on this idea for a long time and I have not been able to describe it so well, in so few words as this.
Well done, and thanks
One problem with applying it is that could violate social contracts. When most people are playing by the rules, but one person gains advantage by cheating. Suddenly, it's more a freeloader/jerk move, than anything else.
Admittedly, things get more complicated when many people believe that the social contracts have already been violated, so there's no longer a contract (or "less" of a contract), so they might as well get the advantage, too. Before it got to that point, it started with early cheaters.
The real world isn't like that.
How the causality works there, I don't have good guesses.
But the supposed phenomenon could reduce to simply differing conceptions of what the real world is.
The point is that rules don't matter without consequences for breaking them, and a rule is only as effective as the severity of the consequences.
When you're rewarded for breaking them, you can't even really consider it a rule anymore.
FTX had consequences, but people had a very hard time predicting them for some reason.
> She became friendly with the customer service repos at the stroller manufacturers and could usually get replacement parts for free [...] The real secret sauce to her side-hustle was the relationship she had with the lady who managed the warehouse where she bought the baby stuff.
I think both of these could be OK. Such as if it was within the manager's/rep's authority to do this, and it was aligned with the business.
(For example, the appropriate level of decision-making might have decided that the business gets better rates, or has lower headaches, from letting certain good buyers cherry-pick. And a quality brand of baby stroller might prefer not to see the brand associated with "broken" strollers on the used market, and has an interest in someone repairing them, even if that cannibalized some new sales.)
> and I think she sold the warehouse lady a house.
Where I'd guess this might be a problem is if some question came up over whether the warehouse manager was supposed to be letting cherry-picking happen, and then there's this big-ticket transaction, in which the manager, hypothetically, could've gotten a quid pro quo deal (e.g., preferential access, or a discount on fees, or even discounted pricing).