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Nomads Travel To America's Backroads and Walmarts -- to Stock Amazon's Shelves (theverge.com) 136

Posted by EditorDavid from the van-life dept.
The Verge recently profiled "a small group of merchants who travel the backroads of America searching clearance aisles and dying chains for goods to sell on Amazon.

"Some live out of RVs and vans, moving from town to town, only stopping long enough to pick the stores clean and ship their wares to Amazon's fulfillment centers." The majority of goods sold on Amazon are not sold by Amazon itself, but by more than 2 million merchants who use the company's platform as their storefront and infrastructure. Some of these sellers make their own products, while others practice arbitrage, buying and reselling wares from other retailers. Amazon has made this easy to do, first by launching Fulfillment by Amazon, which allows sellers to send their goods to company warehouses and have Amazon handle storage and delivery, and then with an app that lets sellers scan goods to instantly check whether they'd be profitable to sell on the site. A few sellers, like [Chris] Anderson, have figured out that the best way to find lucrative products is to be mobile, scouring remote stores and chasing hot-selling items from coast to coast.

"It's almost like I'm the front end of the business and Amazon is just an extension of my arm," says Sean-Patrick Iles, a nomad who spent weeks driving cross-country during Toys R Us' final days. It was a feeding frenzy Anderson and others also hit the road for...

For Anderson, the holy grail is the Bounce Dryer Bar, a $5 plastic oblong you affix to the dryer rather than adding a dryer sheet to each load. Now discontinued, a two-pack sells on Amazon for $300. Discontinued nail polish, Pop-Tarts, hair curling products: Anderson has chased them all when the scanner has shown them fetching multiples of their normal price. He once hunted a particular brand of discontinued dental floss across the Big Lots of America, buying six-packs for 99 cents and selling them on Amazon for over $100 apiece.
According to the article, Anderson "thinks the constant travel is part of why his marriage ended..."
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Nomads Travel To America's Backroads and Walmarts -- to Stock Amazon's Shelves More

Nomads Travel To America's Backroads and Walmarts -- to Stock Amazon's Shelves

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  • "Sells" is too strong a word. It is listed at $300, but I doubt they sold any.

    • Re: Sells (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Whooty McWhooface ( 4881303 )
      Anyone who pays $300 for dental floss is part of a money laundering scheme.

      What does it do?  Play your favorite song or whisper sweet nothings when used through bone induction??

      • Re: Sells (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I'll tell you one thing, you whisper sweet nothings in my ear and I guarantee it will be bone inducing.

      • Re: Sells (Score:3, Informative)

        by Lanthanide ( 4982283 )

        You need better reading comprehension. It's $100 for a six pack of dental floss, $300 for a two-pack of "dryer bars".

    • Re: Sells (Score:4, Insightful)

      by triffid_98 ( 899609 ) on Sunday July 14, 2019 @12:19PM (#58924376)
      "valued" at $300. I would feel some measure of pity but these clowns are why release day consoles have a 200% markup so I'll start heating up the torture implements instead. Sorry, "allegedly" heating up. Thanks 9/11 for creating felony thought crime, you are the gift that keeps on giving
    • There are numerous problems with Amazon web pages. Apparently there is no management overview.

      Also, people are giving fake reviews on Amazon to discourage the sale of competing products.
    • Don't forget: FREE SHIPPING!

    • "Sells" is too strong a word. It is listed at $300, but I doubt they sold any.

      It states in TFA that the buyer had just sold one. If he bought at a big enough discount then he'd only need one.

    • "Sells" is too strong a word. It is listed at $300, but I doubt they sold any.

      A $300 Bounce Dryer Bar reminds me of that saying some people have more money than sense.

  • Hardly new (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I know people that have done this since eBay first started. It is just another form of arbitrage. It is also why I refuse to buy from such sellers.

    • Re: Hardly new (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I know people who have done this since before the internet went public. Every once in a rare while they stumble across an item they can make a large % on, but most of the time the margins are slim and they'd make more money per hour just working a minimum wage job.

      • Re: Hardly new (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I can never find anything good.

      • Re: Hardly new (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Traveling merchants getting goods for cheaper than they can sell them for I'm a different market. Hmmm, yes, hardly new. Try millennia old.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Kinda puts the whole "silk road" into perspective (the original one, not the recent drug site) doesn't it? :)

    • It is also why I refuse to buy from such sellers.

      How do you know who are "such sellers", and what is the advantage of not buying from them?

      • Re:Hardly new (Score:5, Interesting)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Sunday July 14, 2019 @12:13PM (#58924344) Homepage Journal

        When you see something you want on Amazon it's often worth doing a quick search to check if it is really a bargain.

        Your favourite search engine will get you some price comparisons, and sites like CamelCamelCamel track prices over time so you can see if it's likely to get cheaper at some point.

        There are people who making a living selling Amazon stuff on eBay too. They just wait for orders to come in, and then use Amazon to drop-ship to the buyer. Mark it as a gift so they don't include the invoice. This has been happening for decades.

        • Re:Hardly new (Score:5, Insightful)

          by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Sunday July 14, 2019 @02:13PM (#58924930) Homepage Journal

          Your favourite search engine will get you some price comparisons, and sites like CamelCamelCamel track prices over time so you can see if it's likely to get cheaper at some point.

          I use the "Amazon Camel Graph Revived/Fixed" user script to get camelcamelcamel graphs on amazon pages. If the price seems to have gone up, I know to put more effort into looking around.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Hall ( 962 )

        Amazon tells you who the seller is. I tend to stick to items that are "sold by Amazon". Then there are "sold by company 'x', fulfilled by Amazon". That's what this story is about - 3rd-party sellers who have Amazon store and ship their products. Then there are items that are sold and shipped entirely by the 3rd-party. These people simply use Amazon as their store-front, online shop.

  • This is why I gave up on action figure collecting (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday July 14, 2019 @11:43AM (#58924190)
    this has been going on since at least 2000, although mostly on smaller sites. I remember trying to get the Ephant Mon figure back in the day and finding out it'd been "scalped" to the point where it was impossible to find.

    The one that really annoyed me was the Gundam Seed figures. The scalpers bought them _all_. They were selling for over $100 online. Thing is nobody's gonna pay that for a Gundam figure, they'll just buy the Master Grade kit. I'm pretty sure it affected the popularity of the series. Getting merch into the hands of fans is critical for keeping excitement going. Seed Bombed in the states and it wasn't long before I saw them discounted for $2-$3 a pop at K-Bee Toys (man, this was a long time ago).

    • What language is this written in?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Works for those Funco Pop abominations.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Of course you'd be an action figure collector. I had to compete with your kind for Stormtrooper figures as a kid. Had a grown man try to outrun me to the toy aisle when Target opened and then complain to my mother that "He's just gonna open it and play with it". "You mean you don't? That's weird." Love you Mom.

      SEED bombed because most Americans thought it was the third reboot of Gundam Wing they'd seen in five years. None of those people had heard of Master Grade. They just saw the piddly little stiff-limb

  • Jeez. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    What a dismal existence.

  • Price of making things available (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    On one hand they are making something that was only available in a store in the middle of nowhere available to a wider area but making lots of money in the process. I think eventually companies like Walmart will smarten up and sell their discontinued stock directly online instead of letting it get arbitraged.

    • Re: Price of making things available (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Miamicanes ( 730264 ) on Sunday July 14, 2019 @12:46PM (#58924506)

      I think Ikea should do this with discontinued items from series like Besta, Billy, Pax, etc... instead of blowing out discontinued items, inventory them, leave them in the warehouse of the store where they are, and sell them online at 100% markup from their old price (plus shipping) to desperate people who own a room full of related items, then either break something or want to slightly reconfigure them 3-7 years later.

      Last year, I spent a small fortune (compared to the cost of the new model) buying a wall mounting kit on eBay for older Besta units (new kits don't fit old Besta units properly) that were ~9 years old & I wanted to reconfigure. I know I'm not the only person with ~$2500 worth of Besta+Billy stuff who's wanted to reconfigure it 5-10 years later as my needs evolved & total replacement was out of the question.

      • And spend resources for warehouse space, property tax (you pay that on inventory, too), etc. So the stuff you sell now subsidizes the stuff you don't sell anymore...good way to lose to the competition.

        • > you pay that on inventory, too

          I suppose that depends upon your state. In Florida, inventory is explicitly exempt from property taxes.

          And once again, it's not like Ikea is nimbly leasing warehouse space by the square foot. They build a huge building whose division between 'retail floor' and 'warehouse' is relatively fixed at the time of construction, and that's it. You take the escalator upstairs, roam through their maze of room exhibits, go down the stairs, roam through their second maze with merchand

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        If there as a market for such things you would think that someone could easily do a run of compatible wall mounting kits. A quick Google suggests that they are only L shaped brackets and some screws. In fact you could probably make your own with some DIY store pre-shaped metal parts and a drill. Would help if someone posted the dimensions online but you could probably figure out the measurements yourself easily enough.

      • I know of one company that sort-of does this: Oneida. I accidentally ground one of our spoons in the disposal. Wife said hey, be careful, they don’t make that pattern anymore. Fine. I get on the website: yep, discontinued 2009, but they still have stock. I ordered eight more place settings. It will last until we’re dead.

    • Re:Price of making things available (Score:5, Informative)

      by Actually, I do RTFA ( 1058596 ) on Sunday July 14, 2019 @12:48PM (#58924512)

      It's probably not worth it the vast majority of the time. Just like there are some people who will look through their change and occasionally find a rare coin, Walmart isn't going to hire people to do that. And, it's not clear anyone is buying these in sufficient quantity to matter. For instance, that $300 dryer bar had one customer last month. Worldwide.

      The article is big on "freedom of the open road" and "possessions own you", so I don't think they're really making a ton of money. In fact, the one person who put an annual earnings on said $40,000. For a beyond full-time job. And, they're tying up a lot of assets to own inventory. Money at risk, because they're purchases based on historical prices on thinly traded goods.

      Walmart is all about making a consistent profit, consistent turnover. These guys are all about rare sales.

  • Like a Neal Stephenson novel (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    In Ontario, Amazon has started using a delivery service called Intercom. They're basically an Uber for deliveries. Almost everything I order is now delivered next day (not just 2 day delivery). Even if I order on a Saturday I get it on Sunday. The company requires you to have a van or SUV and a phone with 3GB of data per month minimum. I can tell you most delivery guys are new immigrants who can't speak English well. I'm not sure how much they make, but I'd bet they're barely paying their expenses. I

  • People who scratch out a living with retail arbitrage are the bottom feeders of society. They create no value, contribute nothing to society, and have a bleak future. This is an example of what happens when the middle-class is in decline and people with little education and even less job prospects find themselves with their backs against the wall and their only other option is being homeless. Living out of a van like a modern day gypsy is no fun, but it's better than living on the sidewalk.

    • Re:Bottom Feeders (Score:5, Insightful)

      by slashkitty ( 21637 ) on Sunday July 14, 2019 @01:20PM (#58924686) Homepage
      Bottom Feeders are incredibly useful to aquatic life. Cleaning the oceans is much needed job. These arbitrage people do the same thing. Clean off shelves on stores across the country and find places where they are wanted. Otherwise, many of these products would have ended up in a landfill!

    • They contribute to society. They make products that would go to a landfill accessible to people who want them.

      They do have a bleak future, profits are down year over year.

    • By definition they are creating value - that's what profit is.

      They're taking particular goods that have limited availability and improving the availability for customers who would like to buy the products but otherwise can't.

      Feel free to judge the people paying crazy money for a specific brand if dental floss, but the arbitragers aren't bottom feeders. There are plenty of make-work jobs that ultimately don't improve the human race, no need to single out this one as being a dead weight loss.

  • It amazes me (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday July 14, 2019 @01:12PM (#58924632)

    I am sometimes amazed by the amount of work some people will put in to avoid having a job. And it seems like they generally end up with almost no net income.

    • Some people are willing to accept fewer material possessions to be their own boss, and drive around in an RV. Certainly, a lot of people want to do that when they retired. And for those people, fine. As long as they know they're making less money for the chance to drive around the country. The ones who think they'll strike it rich are, of course, sad and deluded.

  • In an open market economy, the products that large numbers of consumers like want should always be available, right? But given a bonehead corporate decision or an asteroidal impact of governmental bullshit, a highly popular product can sometimes vanish.

    A flagrant example of the latter is the popular antidiarrheal, loperamide, most often branded as Imodium. If you have the runs, one capsule works immediately. Historically loperamide has had one big problem: the horrible armored blister pack that requires tin snips to open. Everyone was relieved, so to speak, when manufacturers began making the capsules available in little purse-sized bottles.

    But because of some alleged brief fad for kids getting high on large numbers of the capsules, the FDA ruled in 2018 against manufacture of the bottled packaging (https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-drug-safety-communication-fda-limits-packaging-anti-diarrhea-medicine-loperamide-imodium). Now when you get loperamide in stores, your only format choice is the damnable blister packs.

    Amazon to the rescue! The entrepreneurs described herein have made the last few capsule bottles available: https://amazon.com/Imodium-Mul... [amazon.com]

    You probably won't want to pay $41.68 a bottle for these, but it's that or carry the tin snips again.

    • Why would blister packaging matter? Literally to make it harder to access each pill?

      • Why would blister packaging matter? Literally to make it harder to access each pill?

        As seen in my link, this was literally the FDA's argument for requiring an inconvenient blister pack.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DogDude ( 805747 )
      the horrible armored blister pack that requires tin snips to open

      I open them with my hands. They have a little tear notch to get you started. If you're not strong enough, you can use scissors, any sort of knife, a nail clipper...

      • Blister packs are in common use for a great many medications, and are designed to be accessible in one of two ways. Sturdy pills are pushed through a foil backing. Fragile products, and loperamide is one of these, require a corner tab that, when pulled, directly exposes the pill. The traditional pack for Imodium brand features a pull tab that refuses to separate from the backing so it can be peeled. The generic brands generally have a corner that easily folds down and then just as easily comes off in your h

  • No wonder I never get the deals (Score:3)

    by guacamole ( 24270 ) on Sunday July 14, 2019 @02:10PM (#58924908)

    When I visit deals tracking sites like slickdeals, I often see posts like "Vacuum clearance at Target, half price, YMMV". Well, I tried to follow up such posts a few times, and I was always too late. But now I realize that scooping these clearance items is basically somebody's full time job.

  • Owning nothing is great until.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Sunday July 14, 2019 @02:17PM (#58924950)
    ... something happens, and you wish to God that you had spent your life trying to own something instead of running like a hamster on a wheel. In the US, you either are an owner, or a worker. These people have doomed themselves to being a worker for the rest of their lives. It's a sad state of affairs. 50 years ago, even the poorest people used to be able to save and live a decent life in a house that they owned with maybe a car, an occasional vacation, and they'd even be able to see a doctor. These people have nothing. They're wasting their time shuffling around garbage just to avoid having to figure out something to make their lives better (which might involve leaving the US). The US is an awful, brutal place to live if you don't own anything.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • It's a sad state of affairs. 50 years ago, even the poorest people used to be able to save and live a decent life in a house that they owned with maybe a car, an occasional vacation, and they'd even be able to see a doctor.

      0.o I don't know which country or even which planet you grew up on - but you're full of shit. There's never been a time in the US where "even the poorest" lived like the lower middle class.

    • Owning something is great until something happens, and you learn that the systems supposedly in place for your protection don't function the way you think they do.

      Two years after the Valley fire in Lake County, CA, only about 20% of homes were in any stage of the rebuilding process [kqed.org] due to a broad variety of factors [pressdemocrat.com] including underinsurance, uninsurance, the period of time between application and permitting, the cost of permitting, and theft of building materials from job sites. Much of the same can be expec [pressdemocrat.com]

  • This is why shopping on Amazon is a crap shoot (Score:5, Insightful)

    by magzteel ( 5013587 ) on Sunday July 14, 2019 @04:42PM (#58925546)

    This is why shopping on Amazon has become a crap shoot. You have no idea what you are buying any more. Some guy in a van buys some closeout from a Big Lots which is already a closeout seller, puts it up for sale on Amazon, and Amazon happily handles the sales and fulfillment. This stuff could be counterfeit, contaminated, stolen, whatever, Amazon couldn't care less.

    Amazon looks like a retailer but it is actually a flea market.

  • when I began to hear "Ster-i-lize" in the aisles.

  • So a mobile version of Del Trotter.

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