That’s what I was thinking too. There are whole subreddits setup to work this kind of hustle. These people see nothing wrong with what they do, even going so far as to claim that they’re doing a service to the world. In my eyes, they’re bottom-feeding scum no better than scalpers, car salespeople, or MLM huns.

…or financial assets arbitrage! (Not /s)

"Pure" flippers and drop shippers who do none of the value adding work of buying large lots and retailing them, holding things over time, etc are both a worthless drag on the economy and a great argument against equivalent financial products.

>> buying large lots and retailing them, holding things over time, etc are both a worthless drag on the economy...

Like grocery stores? Department stores? Costco? Buying in bulk and selling smaller lots to consumers over time is the definition of retail sales.

If you want to eliminate middlemen and buy only from manufacturers, you better first know/learn chinese, japanese, french, german and spanish. And get a forklift. Most only ship product by the pallet.

> who do none of the value adding work of buying large lots and retailing the ...

I think they're saying that is the value added work, which they don't do.

I dont think so. We might not like dealing with them, but even the most horrible of middlemen still provide liquidity to a market. Amazon got its start as a middleman for books, and was hated for what it did to the retail bookshops, but it did inject liquidity to the betterment of consumers.

I think you need to re-read the posts you're replying to. Everyone is specifically saying warehousers add value to the chain. Drop shippers do not.

You might want to re-read that post you quoted, your snipped quote inverts the intended meaning.

>no better than scalpers

scalping is entirely rational, there is an item that you can acquire cheap and sell for a lot, that's the basis of every business that exists.

yes, at your family home you can expect that people will leave you "your" cookie (actually, not my siblings) but bringing that ethos to the marketplace will lead to disappointment.

> that's the basis of every business that exists

No, it's really not. Someone who buys up all of the new PS5s with a script and then re-sells them on Ebay for 2x retails is providing no positive service. Same shit is happening even to publicly reservable campsites lately. I don't believe in Hell, but if there is one then there's definitely a spot reserved in the 7th layer for people who scalp.

ebay charges something like a 12.5% commission. It's easily over $100 in fees to sell a decent laptop on ebay. So, the seller would have to be charging quite a bit more for that to work out.

It's not commission free for private sales here in Germany.