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28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

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Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#141

Post by eropple »

koancone wrote: post #140

I am not sure what the point of these news stories is. Arbitrage opportunities have existed throughout history. How is it newsworthy? However, a basic understanding of economics would indicate that such market inefficiencies tend to disappear once widely publicized. I guess the journalist wants to grab a piece of the ephemeral surplus by publishing. In the same vein I don't understand why people share truly original…

> waste their time contributing to open source

"Waste time." I shouldn't reply to this kind of antisociality, but this is gross enough that I feel compelled to. I contribute to open source because it is the right thing to do, because I have gotten so much from it that it is only right to pay it forward. You should be doing the same, not sneering at people with a sense of community to them.

Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#142

Post by koancone »

seanalltogether wrote: post #129
bayesian_horse wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exploitation of the strategy can be limited by two factors: "labor" and "capital". It sounds like labor is the more limiting factor, though. Also, some of these prices aren't set at maximum profit per item, but there are other factors involved. For example clearing warehouses or attracting customers. In many cases, I suppose Walmart should be coming up with a way to sell direct to Amazon, but that may not be what…

I wonder if Walmart simply can't afford to play arbitrage with clearance stock at the size of their organization. The amount of manpower and shipping time they would have to add to localized stock management might end up eating away at any additional profits. From their perspective Ryan is probably helping them out by emptying their clearance stock faster. If the local manager was smart he'd keep his number on speed…

My experience, from shopping in Walmart quite frequently, is that they are highly disorganized and un-nimble. I guess this affords the opportunity for persistent arbitrages. For example, my local Walmart supercenter routinely runs out of certain products (not usually the same products). Sometimes it feels like GUM (An iconic USSR department store in Moscow). I gone shopping and found them missing any kind nutcracker ( a basic utensil), grapefruit juice, landscaping mulch, etc (many more examples). At the beginning of August the garden center had already moved out all its mulch for the year and filled the shelves with de-icing salt lol. The people who run the place do not seem to understand opportunity costs: they lost a sale in me and I am pretty sure nearly no-one is buying de-icing salt at the beginning of August. This is a northern USA store but where I live the weather is in the 60-70 through October: grass still grows, gardens still can be mulched. The stores are overstaffed with floor people (seemingly wandering around Lord of the Flies style) but not only 3-4 of 20 checkout lanes are open at a given time. Nearly every single canned good is dented or has a dirty lid. Their self checkout POS run on Windows 7 (lol) and update firmware automatically when they reboot which is hardly ever but for a power outage. If there are intermittent power outages in a storm a POS could reboot on the first outage and be bricked on the second one while updating firmware. There are so many opportunities for improvement with Walmart but the capital cost of a competitor entering the industry is so high. I am not sure if Amazon can be a real competitor (I think they largely serve different sets of customers).

Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#143

Post by golf1052 »

eropple wrote: post #141
koancone wrote: post #140

I am not sure what the point of these news stories is. Arbitrage opportunities have existed throughout history. How is it newsworthy? However, a basic understanding of economics would indicate that such market inefficiencies tend to disappear once widely publicized. I guess the journalist wants to grab a piece of the ephemeral surplus by publishing. In the same vein I don't understand why people share truly original…

> waste their time contributing to open source "Waste time." I shouldn't reply to this kind of antisociality, but this is gross enough that I feel compelled to. I contribute to open source because it is the right thing to do, because I have gotten so much from it that it is only right to pay it forward. You should be doing the same, not sneering at people with a sense of community to them.

You're very right, the internet and technology would be very different if open source didn't exist.

Basically saying, if you aren't only helping yourself and turning a profit you're doing it wrong is a little disturbing to hear.

Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#144

Post by koancone »

golf1052 wrote: post #143
eropple wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> waste their time contributing to open source "Waste time." I shouldn't reply to this kind of antisociality, but this is gross enough that I feel compelled to. I contribute to open source because it is the right thing to do, because I have gotten so much from it that it is only right to pay it forward. You should be doing the same, not sneering at people with a sense of community to them.

You're very right, the internet and technology would be very different if open source didn't exist. Basically saying, if you aren't only helping yourself and turning a profit you're doing it wrong is a little disturbing to hear.

The internet and modern computers are the result of Government and University funding (e.g. DARPA, UC Berkeley BSD) and corporate R & D projects like Xerox Alto / Start at PARC and Bell Labs Unix, C, etc.

Free Open source volunteers merely imitated (Linux vs. Unix) or extended institutional or corporate sponsored projects or ideas. Without robust government and corporate funding of basic research in the later 20th century we would not have the well developed information technology industry we have today. People founding vanity projects, ICOs, and forking is not moving the industry forward. What truly revolutionary innovations have originated from open source software vs. just imitation or variation?

Blockchain is revolutionary but the developers did monetize their work in that case (literally). In this society you need to earn money to live. It is mysterious that so many people in software want to practice their trade for free. I guess they love what they do but I think the quality of their work would increase if it was monetized. Monetization need not imply centralization or appropriation c.f. bitcoin.

It just means assigning value and ownership to the results of socially valuable work. What is so evil about that? I think, from an evolutionary psych view why people think contributing to OSS is prosocial is because of something like a genetic tendency to share new technology with the tribe. In the ancestral environment it would have been uncool for one shaman to have monopolized a new flint knapping technique. But with the rise of trade and property right people can develop and protect their competitive advantage / economic niche and monetize their work for benefit of the whole of society why collecting a reward from their innovations. Free Open Source fanatics like the GNU people are stuck in the stone age and do the profession of software development a disservice.

Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#145

Post by kpwagner »

astura wrote: post #139
kpwagner wrote: post #130

Many brands are "gating" their products on Amazon so only select resellers can sell them on Amazon. For example, the article mentions LEGO--restricted. You need to show Amazon proof that you purchased your products from a credible distributor in order to list your LEGO products. Receipts from Walmart are not enough.

Lego is gated? Since when? I sell Lego on Amazon. It's been a few months since I sold any though.

Huh. That's curious. Maybe you got grandfathered in. It's definitely restricted for new sellers. Anything Disney, which it turns out is a lot of stuff these days, is all restricted too.

Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#147

Post by koancone »

koancone wrote: post #144
golf1052 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're very right, the internet and technology would be very different if open source didn't exist. Basically saying, if you aren't only helping yourself and turning a profit you're doing it wrong is a little disturbing to hear.

The internet and modern computers are the result of Government and University funding (e.g. DARPA, UC Berkeley BSD) and corporate R & D projects like Xerox Alto / Start at PARC and Bell Labs Unix, C, etc. Free Open source volunteers merely imitated (Linux vs. Unix) or extended institutional or corporate sponsored projects or ideas. Without robust government and corporate funding of basic research in the later 20th ce…

It is also possible that Satoshi Nakamoto was an alias for an NSA project. I have no special knowledge either way on this matter.

Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#148

Post by farah7 »

koancone wrote: post #140

I am not sure what the point of these news stories is. Arbitrage opportunities have existed throughout history. How is it newsworthy? However, a basic understanding of economics would indicate that such market inefficiencies tend to disappear once widely publicized. I guess the journalist wants to grab a piece of the ephemeral surplus by publishing. In the same vein I don't understand why people share truly original…

>If I had been practising the sort of arbitrage the guy in the article was doing I would have been highly motivated to keep it secret

By your own token I think the sharing of such information would be "newsworthy". Your comment is rather inconsistent.

Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#149

Post by mcphage »

tyingq wrote: post #40
ssanders82 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the article says "his business is making seven-figure profits"

Hmm. Seems unlikely given the manual nature of shopping at WalMart, shipping costs, returns, etc, on an $8M revenue base. Edit: He contradicts himself... "four years later, we're a team of 11 and we're doing well over $200,000 in sales per month" $200k/month isn't even close to $8M/year. And you aren't netting 7 figures with $200k/month and 11 employees. Now I'm thinking this is just a puff piece for his get-rich-qui…

> $200k/month isn't even close to $8M/year.

It doesn't say $8M/year, it says $8M total sales by the end of this year. So from the founding of his company, to the end of this year.

Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#150

Post by itronitron »

cc439 wrote: post #110
LilBytes wrote: post #90

My friend does exactly this between IKEA and Ebay. Here in Australia, IKEA does not ship (not sure if they do else where) so she buys a heap of items at the Ikea stores and flips them online. She's been doing it for years and does pretty well at it. Here in Australia, IKEA stores are few and far between so her arbitrage is a huge value add for a lot of her customers since IKEA cannot (won't?) ship and traveling X KM'…

I used to think IKEA was insane for running such a "20th Century" business model for shipping their products. The fact that you cannot purchase anything from IKEA's website and have it delivered without incurring a $129 delivery fee is crazy when taken at face value. However, I've come to understand why they have limited their delivery service. Their flat pack products are their profit centers and the packaging that…

That sounds about right, and I doubt that their warehouse people are fully equipped to package IKEA goods properly for shipping. When I have had orders shipped from IKEA online they have typically been poorly packaged, with pieces close to falling out of the boxes.
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