2020: The Year of the Reseller
For the better part of the last decade, my full-time job has been involved in the retail world. Most recently, I held a position where I was a brand advocate inside of a big box store. During this time I became acquainted with the concept of the reseller. What would happen is that the store would run a rather aggressive sale, for example, $100 off of a new iPad. And what we would see occur is people coming in to buy as many of these as possible to be able to sell at a profit. Using the iPad example, these buyers would wait for the price to rise again before attempting to sell their discounted units for a slight profit.
I always thought that this was a peculiar way to make money that required a lot of research and leg work to find the deals and go obtain the product from various stores. This subset of the population has always felt rather fringe, the people that sell things on eBay as a primary source of income. This year, however, has been an unusual one. The global pandemic put a halt to manufacturing that caused several product shortages, and with these product shortages came the demand for them. And wherever there is demand without supply, there are sure to be price increases. And it was these resellers that took advantage of this situation. 2020 has been the year of the reseller.
