I bought an n99 anti pollution mask last year on amazon $9.99 2 filters.
Checked the same listing now, $40
Amazon sellers ‘hijack’ listings to sell face masks despite new rules
81–90 of 114 posts
Re: Amazon sellers ‘hijack’ listings to sell face masks despite new rules
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
So only rich people deserve items demanded in a panic? The proper control is limit purchase per person per day. Raising prices on things like masks in a viral contagion like this is unconscionable
If there are 10,000 masks in stock but 100,000 people want to buy a mask, how do you distribute the masks to people? In a free market the price is determined by supply and demand, such that only 10,000 people will be willing to pay the higher price of the mask. Socialism doesn't work in this case, you just can't satisfy everyone's need for masks. I'd argue that people shouldn't even buy masks during pandemics and the…
"From each according to their ability, to each according to their need", as the maxim goes.
You distribute according to highest need. Which is what you said.
It's strange that you said "socialism doesn't work here" and then in the next sentence gave the socialist solution "distribute according to the greatest need"; which here would be medical staff.
The difficulty with that is human greed. Capitalism embodies human greed and turns it, with careful intervention, towards a relatively useful force (when resources are limitless!). Communism tries to fight human greed, which is why it can't be imposed and must be adopted. Communistic systems readily get overrun by capitalistic actions - under war-time rationing, for example, black markets rise up ... one greedy person ruins the whole system, one generous person does not.
Re: Amazon sellers ‘hijack’ listings to sell face masks despite new rules
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems to be that a single intern whose only job was to search for prohibited items and unlist them could do better Really, just use Mechanical Turk. Their inability to handle this is obviously showing they intend to not fix it
You can create hundreds of thousands of listings almost instantly through the API or by uploading a spreadsheet to Amazon. It's not possible for manual review for all of them because of this. That is why they lean so heavily on both automation and armies of cheap contractors.
So, charge a fee of $5 to add or change a product page, to cover the cost of review. Maybe refund part of it for truly trivial changes.
Or give customers an automatic refund for reporting products sold against Amazon's policies - so any 1000%-marked-up face masks are free to customers.
Re: Amazon sellers ‘hijack’ listings to sell face masks despite new rules
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
It absolutely is evil. Buying out local inventory and selling it for a profit to the same people who would have bought it anyway isn't doing anyone a service. It's not "adding liquidity" to the market. It's not bringing more supply. It's adding a pointless middleman to a transaction that would have happened anyway - it's an inefficiency. It would be a different matter if these people were actually sourcing masks from…
Regardless of if they make a profit, they saw a discrepancy between current prices and what they considered more accurate prices and to the extent they made a profit they were correct. There is still the huge benefit that now these masks will be purchased in more reasonable quantities by customers, ensuring more people get the masks they need.
> There is still the huge benefit that now these masks will be purchased in more reasonable quantities by customers, ensuring more people get the masks they need
Lol, no way. The need is for medical staff. These will either sit in some gouger's garage waiting for a premium price, or be needlessly used by someone affluent. Neither which is "need".
Re: Amazon sellers ‘hijack’ listings to sell face masks despite new rules
#85> We use sophisticated tools, including machine learning, to combat them, and we are making it increasingly difficult for bad actors to hide. So sophisticated that some reporter for wired could find them in the top few hundred bestsellers in a few minutes with a quick visual scan. Let’s be clear: Amazon should not be censoring legal items on their platform. However, their efforts at stopping it are purely a PR matter…
> We use sophisticated tools, including machine learning
We do nothing, but to dodge any possible legal liability related to the price gouging. We'll say that we use "machine learning" so we could respond to any critique with "oops, algo is bad, but we do our best efforts" while doing nothing.
Re: Amazon sellers ‘hijack’ listings to sell face masks despite new rules
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems to be that a single intern whose only job was to search for prohibited items and unlist them could do better Really, just use Mechanical Turk. Their inability to handle this is obviously showing they intend to not fix it
You can create hundreds of thousands of listings almost instantly through the API or by uploading a spreadsheet to Amazon. It's not possible for manual review for all of them because of this. That is why they lean so heavily on both automation and armies of cheap contractors.
Rate limiting on the API and the spreadsheet rows, except for approved accounts.
Re: Amazon sellers ‘hijack’ listings to sell face masks despite new rules
#87If only we could get rid of this widespread notion that price gouging is bad/evil...
Yeah. When supplies can't meet demand, raising prices serves to discourage people from buying more than they need or buying just to resell.
That works fine for non-essential goods. New mobile phone - sure. But once we're in a "rich asshole can buy out the supply of life-saving equipment by outbidding hospitals" territory, any talk of market efficiency should go out of the window. If we don't do that, we may just as well start analysing market efficiency of slave ownership - market numbers more important than people.
Re: Amazon sellers ‘hijack’ listings to sell face masks despite new rules
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. When supplies can't meet demand, raising prices serves to discourage people from buying more than they need or buying just to resell.
That works fine for non-essential goods. New mobile phone - sure. But once we're in a "rich asshole can buy out the supply of life-saving equipment by outbidding hospitals" territory, any talk of market efficiency should go out of the window. If we don't do that, we may just as well start analysing market efficiency of slave ownership - market numbers more important than people.
Sure, in this case the rich asshole is the federal government. Unfortunately.
Re: Amazon sellers ‘hijack’ listings to sell face masks despite new rules
#89I've got a decent amount of n95 (both 3M and HDX HD Brand) masks that we lucked into more than a significant amount of time ago. We are afraid to list them, at any price, because I'm afraid ebay/amazon will kill our listings at any price. I'm ready to ship them for free, of all costs, I just don't want my amazon "privileges" revoked. who do i give n95 masks too? edit: they are 2024 exp dates
> who do i give n95 masks too? Donate them to your local hospital. Hospitals everywhere are running short on masks and other PPE, and a lot of doctors and nurses are going to die because of it . Italy is already hemorrhaging medical staff trying to stop the virus.
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Re: Amazon sellers ‘hijack’ listings to sell face masks despite new rules
#90I bought an n99 anti pollution mask last year on amazon $9.99 2 filters. Checked the same listing now, $40
4x price increase? That's ... reasonable? Considering the shortages and that the original price is quite low, I can't even call it price gouging, that's just normal adjusting. That's the level of price increase that would convince companies to up production and people to look into their garage for those few boxes they bought and never used.