131–140 of 254 posts
The Amazon reviews got brigaded with 1 star reviews. They should work on preventing this.
Why? Nintendo decided to once again screw over their fans with their supply games. People are getting back at them for it.
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> LOL at the idea that they can't just wait for them to manufacture more of them. I mean, the games have been out for nearly 30 years now, right? Assuming more are eventually manufactured, which many hope to be the case...in this instance. On a related personal note roughly 5 years ago, HP released a limited edition of their 15c RPN scientific calculator[1], which promptly sold out and found their way on eBay listing…
Why are you blaming scalpers for people's woes with the 15c, rather than blaming HP? I see no problem with having different standards for necessities than for luxuries. We'd consider it morally reprehensible to deny food to a poor person, but few people have a problem denying yachts to a poor person.
The point of bringing up the 15c instance was to highlight the apparent assumption that manufacturer supply always trend consumer demand. A large portion of the user community knew in advance that the 15c would be limited release...but so did scalpers as hundreds of units were immediately relisted at super-inflated prices on zero-day. In the end, it's the user community for which the product was intending to target who ultimately loses...which inflames the compromise that I've made in my mind between a legit business incentive to make a fair profit and an underlying hacker ethos.
Furthermore, scalpers have nothing invested in the creation of the end-product, nor do they ever intend to use it, nor is there any value added to their super-inflated relist price, nor do they share in the business risk of bring the product to market. Profiteering is their strict modus operandi. Although it's certainly delusional to think that these bad apples could ever be done away with completely, I think it's equally asinine to point fingers at an OEM (who has invested in and owns the IP rights) without having first excercised due diligence in holding scalpers who are demonstrably contributing to the supply problem publicly accountable for their actions, if only on a moral note. The problem becomes even more exacerbated when technology enables independent scalpers to gain critical mass on a scale that can nerf an entire production lot. It's unfortunate that the only real action the public can take is inaction against scalper relists...it's even more unfortunate that real consequences are practically nonexistent.
What isn't being acknowledged is the very real risk that any company faces with bringing a hardware product to market at scale. Saturate the market with the intent of deterring scalpers and your unsold investment sits in a storage warehouse costing you untold amounts collecting dust. Increase unit cost on the next product lot and suffer consumer outrage. Set the initial cost beyond reasonable profit and you're in price gouging territory. Assuming a sustainable business model, where's the incentive? Again, it's the user community who ultimately loses to the true vectoralist scalper.
The food vs. yacht analogy appears to dismiss reality. In a zero-sum game, the unit cost of a yacht commands a ballpark 6-8 orders of magnitude delta over food. As a society, we indirectly deny poor people yachts on the merit of economic sensibility, not because it's a social luxury; simply replace yacht with a scaleable luxury like cell phone or computer. The notion of an alternative "affordable yacht" is an oxymoron and subjectively exclusive to the wealthy.
Why doesn't Nintendo just raise their prices to where supply equals demand? They're leaving So much money on the table for scalpers. Or why not first release an expensive limited edition while they scale up production?
Because now they get to be on the news with a bunch of stories talking about how hot their new product is.
Clearly thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of gamers were sitting on the product page hammering the F5 key and some random selection thereof got their wish. I highly doubt that. My guess is that third party resellers used bots to purchase them all. Why wouldn't tc come to the same conclusion? Edit. yep here's one on eBay for $500+: http://m.ebay.com/itm/New-Nintendo-NES-Classic-Edition-Conso...
I was doing this (refreshing). I had the Amazon app open on my phone and the website on my MacBook. I added it to my cart from the app at approx 14:00:01 ET, and by the time I clicked the cart and then checkout I got an error message saying the item was sold out. I was so pissed that this happened, because I had been planning to follow this diligently since the day it was announced, and I had no less than 3 calendar…
i am pretty sure the site was hit so hard they just 404'd the URL so it wouldn't load anything. for a while the item page was blank while amazon.com continued to load.
Clearly thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of gamers were sitting on the product page hammering the F5 key and some random selection thereof got their wish. I highly doubt that. My guess is that third party resellers used bots to purchase them all. Why wouldn't tc come to the same conclusion? Edit. yep here's one on eBay for $500+: http://m.ebay.com/itm/New-Nintendo-NES-Classic-Edition-Conso...
The key to this hustle is to never tell your friends that you got one because their con of 'it's for my kids' is incessant.
Looking at some of the eBay sales data already a few have gone for over 600.
Yay for me!
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You can't just take any product, mark it up 10x, and call it a luxury good. People would laugh at you and buy the regular one. A luxury good has to have some reason to justify its luxury status. In this particular case, the $60 NES Classic is already a luxury good. Marking it up 10x doesn't make it more of a luxury good, it just either means people who actually want to use the damn thing can't afford to, or must pay…
http://www.barneys.com/product/golden-goose-distressed-super... You would be surprised.
Edit: here's the Planet Money podcast episode I heard about them on: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/12/25/460870534/episo...
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That is not at all what drop shipping is. Drop shipping is a supply chain management method in which the retailer does not keep goods in stock but instead transfers customer orders and shipment details to either the manufacturer, another retailer, or a wholesaler, who then ships the goods directly to the customer
It's not possible that today's buyers are having them shipped to their own customers? Maybe somebody set up preorders with bots to hit Amazon to fill the orders. Or found a way in Amazon's system to reserve the item but delay shipping until they get the destination address and collect their markup.
Sounds like Nintendo, along with a bunch of other companies, need to take a page out of USSR's book. The way it worked there is that you put your name on the list to buy, say, a car. And when the car is actually manufactured, you get to buy it. Big product launches like this could really benefit from a system like that. I know some places already do this: x.ai comes to mind. They even had a thing where you could move…
Honestly, I was going to buy one. But the itch will probably pass by the time they're back in stock. Since I'm filling that itch with emulators now. At an impulse buy price point, I wonder how many unrecoverable lost sales are caused by lack of supply.