I've said this for years before the covid19 happened.
It seems like there's a whole slew of lawsuits and reports against Amazon recently about price gouging
(mainly about the covid19 pandemic and essential items that were hard to get).
But Amazon is notorious for doubling, tripling or more their prices on items that go out of stock elsewhere.
I know this first hand because as a retail arbitrage person, when every merchant/retail store goes out of stock
on a particular product, then if you search for it on Amazon, some sellers might have it in stock but then
they doubled or tripled the price. Obviously they did that because they know it's out of stock nationwide.
On one hand I can understand why the value of something goes way up when nobody else has it and you do,
giving you the "right" to raise the value of the product. But if individual sellers like me get called out for price gouging,
then giant companies or sellers on those platforms like Amazon should also get called out because they do it worse.
I have a product that I normally get for $4. Now that it is out of stock nationwide, I checked on amazon and the product is
being sold for $12. That's just insane. When the product comes back in stock nationwide and all major vendors have it
again, amazon lowers the price back to $3. They do this with EVERY product whenever it goes out of stock nationwide.
It seems like there's a whole slew of lawsuits and reports against Amazon recently about price gouging
(mainly about the covid19 pandemic and essential items that were hard to get).
But Amazon is notorious for doubling, tripling or more their prices on items that go out of stock elsewhere.
I know this first hand because as a retail arbitrage person, when every merchant/retail store goes out of stock
on a particular product, then if you search for it on Amazon, some sellers might have it in stock but then
they doubled or tripled the price. Obviously they did that because they know it's out of stock nationwide.
On one hand I can understand why the value of something goes way up when nobody else has it and you do,
giving you the "right" to raise the value of the product. But if individual sellers like me get called out for price gouging,
then giant companies or sellers on those platforms like Amazon should also get called out because they do it worse.
I have a product that I normally get for $4. Now that it is out of stock nationwide, I checked on amazon and the product is
being sold for $12. That's just insane. When the product comes back in stock nationwide and all major vendors have it
again, amazon lowers the price back to $3. They do this with EVERY product whenever it goes out of stock nationwide.
