I guess this is one way to make a living. Is it sustainable? Is it gratifying? Is it scalable?
The guy is a hustler, I can appreciate that. He works for himself, I can appreciate that.
However if lots of other people try to do the same thing then does all the competition create a situation where lots of people are squabbling over a few crumbs? It looks like its a niche. And its only a matter of time others try to muscle in on his turf.
> Is it sustainable? Is it gratifying? Is it scalable?
Why does Western Society have a fixation on only doing things that make sense for the rest of your life?
Who cares how long it will last. Who cares about The rest of your life. Do something that's interesting NOW.
Let him enjoy it for however long he wants. When he doesn't enjoy it, or it doesn't work anymore, he'll find something else to do that he finds interesting. That's great for him! Maybe it's not the life you want, but that's not what we're talking about.
Because "in a day" carries the implication "Man makes $2500 every day doing this one simple trick". That's why it's in the headline.
"Man made $2500 doing X once, never to be repeated again" or "Man made $2500 in a year doing X" might be equally true headlines, but a lot less attention grabbing.
"$XXXX in a day" does not carry any such implication to myself, "$XXXX a day" would, but that phrasing seems to have been deliberately avoided -- and even had it been used I'd have to seriously investigate the context of such a headline before concluding the editor that has chosen such a headline thinks that this is something sustainable, scalable, and robust to sudden competition (... given such a thing is quite implausible in general).
I stand by what I wrote. The human mind is generally not that rational and literal, especially when scanning a long list of headlines. The brain sees "$2500", "a day", subconsciously makes a connection that $2500 is more than the reader typically makes in a day, interest is created, link is clicked. No one proceeds to conclude that man is earning $912,500/year, but the connection is made and it's quite intentional from the headline writer.
Here's another example:
"Man makes $2500 in a day by buying a lottery ticket".
That is a weird sentence, because buying a winning lottery ticket is a discrete, non-reproducible event - so why include "in a day", unless it is to suggest something to the reader?
Or another one:
"Man makes $2500 in a day by winning competition after preparing for months" - you can see where I'm going with this.
Theory on why western society has a fixation on only doing things that make sense for the rest of your life: There is no longer a strong generational support system for people such that they can be assured that they have a roof over their head and food to eat after retirement age.
If you have a strong generational support system then I think the focus can shift onto what you want to do now versus what you need to do for later.
No longer? When was there ever? What was the system providing a roof over your head in the 30's or 40's? Or for that matter 1830's? Religion?
No, what's changed is expectation. In the 1830's a lot of people just got old and died, were impoverished and angry about it, but what were they going to do? Now we have widespread literacy and a middle class that doesn't expect poverty until you die as a retirement plan.
> No longer? When was there ever? What was the system providing a roof over your head in the 30's or 40's? Or for that matter 1830's? Religion?
Yes, family and religion. I don't think American society was ever as multi-generational as in Asia or Europe. But, yes, AFAIU back then it was much more common for immediate and even distant families to live under the same roof, long-term or temporarily. Grandpa or Uncle Charlie too old to live alone after being widowed? Move him into your guest room. No hand-wringing negotiation required; no serious disruption to lifestyle.
My grandfather rented his basement to his best friend for years until the friend married, and then the two couples were best friends. It wasn't that the friend had fell on hard times or was wanting for anything; it was just because people back then demanded less personal space and were more comfortable living near or with each other. These days moving into your friends basement is practically a moral failing. I guess maybe because as society has become more diverse we have fewer signals to different in-group people from out-group people; we've been reduced to relying on independence and wealth as the most important markers of people's character.
> Why does Western Society have a fixation on only doing things that make sense for the rest of your life?
It's not western society, it's the ethos of the upper-middle class of western society, which emphasizes not only career stability but intergenerational success. And of course it's also concerned with differentiating itself from lower classes, thus the skepticism/condescension.
Poor and working-class Americans don't talk like that because their time horizons are as equally short as Chinese and Russian hustlers/go-getters.
I'm not sure what your hostility is for. It's a question of relevance to this forum specifically. Thanks for the downvote.
You railing against "Western Society" strikes me as off base, like you have an axe to grind. It doesn't matter to me if he does it once or for the rest of his life. That not why people post stuff like this to hacker.
However what does matter is this video was shared on HACKER NEWS, probably because of its entrepreneurial based content. Most of the links posted here have some sort of connection to either technology, science and/or entrepreneurship. It's not the latest javascript library, but he is using eBay + hustle to brick and mortar stores to generate revenue.
The question is it's relevance to this forum. The guy is trying to make a business, and exploiting gap between supply and demand. That part is interesting. The reason why it's relevant is "can anyone use this video to recreate a similar business?"
Is this video demonstration of a potential service a sustainable, repeatable and potentially scalable business model for others to emulate on this forum? My humble take on it is NO IT IS NOT.
> Who cares how long it will last
Literally most of the people who come to hacker news. We're not to watch some guy drive 700 miles to 20 Walmarts to buy 100+ monopoly board games. Most of us are interested to see if this can be a real business idea.
Which is why I conceded certain points about the idea. He's working for himself. He's hustling. I don't know if he does this full time or in addition to his regular job. There is something impressive to what he's doing. Making $2500 over the course of a weekend is pretty impressive. And if you could keep making $2500 per weekend doing this kind of thing that would be of interest to me, even if it isn't my thing.
I've been moving around Africa for 2.5 years now, and often things from "Western Society" strike me as quite odd or strange. The longer I stay here the more obvious it is how severely broken "our" society really is.
Often I see "Western people" promoting things that don't generate happiness, and attacking things that do generate happiness, and I feel inclined to question that, because that doesn't seem like the right thing to do.
Late reply, but my take is that he wasn't being hostile. He had a genuine question about why that should matter.
And I agree with him. Not everything needs to be sustainable. Not everything needs to be profitable over the long haul. Sometimes getting set up to take advantage of a one-time event (e.g., "Snowcopalypse" T-Shirts) with a short horizon is worth doing and worth studying for future opportunities.
My personal take on what he's saying is "adapt or die."
Yup. A good pivot if the profits in original activity dry out. Mine out all the gold, tell people there still may be some, and sell shovels to suckers.
I don't doubt you, but I've heard a wide range of numbers. What I've never seen is a screenshot of someones actually stats. Maybe I'm not looking, maybe it's against TOS, maybe no one wants to share because it's not as good as it seems.
It's definitely against their rules to publicly tell people how much youtube's paying you.
0.50-1.00 USD per 1k is also the range I've heard. But there are ways you can completely screw yourself over...
If you get a copyright notice on the video, even a false/automated one, you don't get anything until it's resolved. If you're a popular channel most of your views are going to be within the first 48 hours, and the money you would have gotten within that time is gone.
The last time I checked, your videos can also be de-monitized randomly without notifying you, because they "may not be suitable for advertising". This is done by bots 99% of the time and you'll have to have the video reviewed manually before you can run ads again (Yes, they're actually trying to get bots to recognize offensive content, and it's done with the content itself, not just the video title/desc).
I also once saw someone do a video subtitle/translation and strike the original owner for copyright infringement. Whether this was accidental or not I don't know, but it took days to resolve.
(this post is accurate based on how youtube worked ~6 months ago, it's possible they've changed things but I'm not betting on it)
There's a small time news guy named Tim Pool that I enjoy watching on YT. He has taken to silly things like saying "items which move projectiles at very rapid speeds" instead of "gun" when presenting a news story because the Google AI automatically demonetizes his news stories if the voice recognition hears the word "gun." He has to do this for any potentially controversial words.
I remember when the PS3 came out. There were a lot of people who were convinced it was going to be in real short supply so bought multiple at midnight launch to sell them on ebay. Unfortunately the demand wasn't really there and a lot of them ended up selling for below cost.
No, it was PS3s. Here is an article about it from the time: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2006/12/6406/ the Wii unexpectedly ended up being the real in demand system that Christmas.
Most Americans don't know there's a subeconomy in the U.S. where Chinese merchants buy items from retail stores and sell them to customers in China. The successful ones hire people to shop in stores. What do they buy? iPhones, diapers, baby formula, LV purses, lottery tickets...
This was enormous for Apple during the iPhone 3G launch. Nearly every retail purchase was 5 iPhones, the max per customer. It was profitable enough that these were all bought on contract then cancelled, which I think was the only way at the time.
Even cars: there is a huge business of people buying up brand new luxury cars in the US, then immediately putting them on a boat to China. The manufacturers hate it, and try to write sales contracts to prevent it, but it's so lucrative that it constantly attracts new people into the game
Its remarkable if its the only one on the block, or in the whole city: I was walking down a quiet residential street in Europe once and was surprised to see a giant red pickup sitting in the driveway. Looked incredibly out of place.
I had a friend in England who said the big thing to do when you "made it" was to import a Cadillac Escalade from the States. You could tell because they were left hand drive. Here in North America, Escalades don't seem like such a big deal anymore.
Alternative to the other explanation: The only reason it would be a grey market activity is because the vehicle is more expensive in the native market.
So Widgets Ltd. is selling widgets for $100 in China, but $30 in the US. Lots of money to be made in the gap.
Indeed, I suspect it has to do with manufacturer's wanting control over prices and supply. E.g. a manufacturer thinks they can charge a higher base price in China because they are a luxury foreign brand.
Presumably because the manufacturers pay tariffs and other expenses in the course of legally bringing vehicles to foreign countries. Now they're competing with folks evading those overheads, on selling their own product, which they've already paid to to bring stock of legally.
I'm still confused. The people doing this are presumably paying retail for those vehicles, so the manufacturer and dealership got their profits out of it. What do they care if someone skirts taxes as long as they made their profit on the retail sale?
This isn't an area I'm experienced with, but there seems to be some rather obvious problems and I suspect there are far more than I'm considering in this brief thought exercise.
The price of the illegally imported equivalents will be substantially lower than those legally imported by the manufacturer.
This will have the effect of driving down the FMV of the vehicle in the region.
But if the manufacturer can't afford to match that FMV because of legal trade and transport overheads, the effect will be reduced sales of the vehicle in the region overall, because the illegal channels obviously can't operate on a large enough scale to 100% replace the legal channel from the manufacturer's perspective.
The illegal channel doesn't have to (and won't) operate at legal-replacement scales to impact the region's perception of the vehicle's FMV.
Also consider what effect it may have on potential buyers interested in buying legally, but exposed to news of the imported brand being so overpriced and so desirable that there's a substantial illicit market emerging to fulfill that demand. The honest consumer might be completely turned off by this, thinking their new car may be a theft target because it's this desirable import brand people are committing risky trade crimes just to sell as new in the country.
The situation seems likely to harm the overall sales volume for the region.
Most businesses price discriminate by geography. A car manufacturer may charge $25,000 USD for a car in the US, but $35,000 USD for a very similar car in Asia. Brands carry different values depending on market. The car company does not want to lose out on that $10,000/car surplus.
There is perhaps no better exposition of the "double freedom" - freedom from society's productive capacity and the products made therein, and freedom to sell one's labour - of most people in society than the example of Chinese people buying iPhones made in China from the U.S.
The same thought crossed my mind years ago when I was in a shopping mall in Prague. There was a Wrangler store selling Wrangler jeans — you know, buy-them-for-cheap-at-Walmart Wrangler jeans — for something like $170 a pair. I couldn’t believe it.
It's more comparable to the unlicensed Pirate Joe's of Canada stockpiling goods by driving across the border and buying them manually in Trader Joe's stores and selling for a premium.
No it’s really arbitrage. This was a store with wall-to-wall Wrangler branding and product. If it was unlicensed (I doubt it, this was a very high end mall), it was very convincing.
I suspect that the quality was substantially higher than the Wrangler jeans you would find at a US Walmart, despite having the same branding. Other brands like Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein have products ranging from budget to ultra high-end, all of which bear the respective brands.
since the new tariffs are being imposed on imports to the US from China, i wonder if we might see a reversal in the direction of this process at some point. i mean, could we start to see large numbers of US residents and other travelers visiting China and bringing back merchandise for resale in the US?
It already happens plenty. Companies with names like 'uxcell' or 'elegoo' have been making a lot of money off of price arbitrage in cheap electronics, for example.
With things like breadboards, wires, common sensors and microcontrollers, LEDs, etc, there's often a 3-10x difference in price between what you'd pay on ebay and what you'd pay on taobao. Amazon charges maybe $3 to tack prime shipping onto an item and handle the whole customer service/returns headache, so it seems like easy money.
Sure, the provenance is dubious, but if you are buying something from a third-party seller called "elegoo" at bottom-barrel prices, you are presumably expecting that no expense has been attempted.
But if anything, the tariffs have made those bulk-import goods more expensive and less competitive with higher-quality alternatives.
> if anything, the tariffs have made those bulk-import goods more expensive
right, so, i guess i'm wondering more about physically compact, relatively expensive products that an individual might buy in China and bring back and sell at a lower price than it's officially available for from tariff paying retailers. i'm sure this is going on a lot now, but i wonder if it might increase in the near future.
(e.g. replacement parts like iPhone screens (which are so often intercepted by Apple and US customs), except that that's a special case involving a huge powerful corporation. )
Yeah, I've had friends who buy iphones in the US and take it back home to china for relatives, because it's cheaper abroad..... How does that work, exactly? Is it because of some sort of luxury tax in China?
From the article:
> It defies something called the law of one price. That economic principle says that the same item should sell for pretty much the same amount of money everywhere it's available.
> Today on the show: We meet the modern middleman and we find out how he makes money doing something that should be economically impossible.
This is a very deliberately sensational way of looking at it. One of the big reasons the one price law works is because there are people who do arbitrage. The first comers to an arbitrage opportunity make a lot of money. Other people come in and try to undercut the first comers and so they make less money and so on. In the long term basically the arbitrage profit tends towards zero.
I think the point is more that it's strange that these giant retailers who've gotten to where they are because they are basically experts at selling goods retail are creating these arbitrage opportunities and largely ignoring them. Intuitively, what you'd expect is for the retailers to find a way to close the arbitrage gap. But in the U.S. we have this kind of strange notion of retailers setting prices based on guidance from the wholesaler or producer and then not allowing any price negotiation. These retailers are used to a world in which realizing the resulting arbitrage was not worth anyone's time or money but the internet has changed that and they haven't adapted.
My partner makes 'spare' money arbitraging between TK Maxx and ebay in the UK, she follows all the big fashion vloggers on youtube then buys the stuff she thinks will sell based on spotting trends across them, she frequently makes 100% margin and averages >50% (across everything).
She does it because it's fun and she's bored but so far she's really damn good at it.
I find it funny that someone with an advanced degree in finance spends her spare time doing that but it's a hobby and she makes more than I do playing Chess (which is zero) so I can't laugh.
This strikes me as wildly unsustainable and something that just can't last, with a big caveat: I thought the exact same thing when people were doing this 20 years ago buying vacuum cleaners at Kmart and flipping them on eBay.
My understanding is that people (like this guy) who are good at this pretty rapidly graduate to doing drop shipping and more online speciality work.
In my limited experience with (3) people who do this, they never really scale/graduate. They just seem to have some different kind of hustle going on, often this is seasonal. When watermelons are in season they'll drive to the next state and buy a truck load of watermelons wholesale from a farmer. Then they sell the watermelons on the side of the road. Same thing with pumpkins near Halloween. Same thing with flowers near Valetine's. Sometimes they'll buy a couple cars and flip them. I think they just enjoy constantly doing something a little different.
I somewhat follow this field (listening to startup podcasts, this has become pretty common theme) and they always seem to graduate to online courses etc. Very few can get away from basically nickel and dimming their way to profitability. It becomes a high labour business with shoppers, packers, shippers etc. As you said, they either need to graduate to drop shipping which is less hands on but perhaps more saturated with more issues, or do course etc.
The guys that make a living in retail arbitrage usually end up buying direct from manufacturer in large quantities. At that point, they still call themselves a retail arbitrage startup because "distributor" is much less sexy.
Are there penalties to posting goods you don't have and selling them before you have them in-hand? Does Amazon penalize sellers for cancelling orders if they can't be delivered?
That's called drop shipping when you list an item you don't have. There's a healthy community of drop shippers in most e-commerce sites.
I'm sure Amazon and other sites do penalize for cancelling orders, so one has to do a cost-benefit analysis if they make a mistake in pricing. E.g. the source increased prices recently but do you want to risk your reputation of your online store?
The risk you're taking on is that you can fulfill the order more cheaply than what the customer bought it for.
Amazon has performance targets that sellers should meet. Last time I saw them, the Pre-fulfillment Cancel Rate target is under 2.5% and the Late Shipment Rate is under 4%. (I'm not sure if they're different for different types of sellers on Amazon or if those are blanket targets for everyone, though.) If you end up on the wrong side of those targets, Amazon sends a warning, but you're not immediately suspended. It's unclear to me exactly at what point you do get suspended... I've seen it happen only when one of those rates gets up to 10% or so, but I've also seen it happen when one of those rates just goes about 1% higher than the target, so I suspect there are a lot of factors behind the scene that are considered (by an algorithm) before suspension/loss of selling privileges like negative feedback rates and other data Amazon measures for each seller.
I'm not a dropshipper, btw. Just someone who's been in charge of a book store's online sales (including on Amazon) for a while. Dropshippers actually drive me crazy because they're usually really bad customers. Many of them make lots of demands of the seller like emailing the tracking number separately (even though Amazon emails it automatically), and removing any pricing info from packing slips, or removing my store's name from packing slips. One drop shipper even asked that I put their store's name onto our packing slip and remove my store's name. All these demands that dropshippers have really slow down our order processing, since almost every single other order we get has no special demands.
Additionally, since they're not the end recipient of the shipments, if the end recipient has a question or issue they have to pass it along to us, and they often do so very poorly. They're often rude, frequently muddle the question, and sometimes make additional, outlandish demands, like "my customer thinks it's taking too long. send another book via overnight shipping or I'll leave a negative review!" I try to report as many of the worst offenders as possible to Amazon, but that takes time out of what I should be working on instead, and often Amazon doesn't care because Amazon Support can be almost as bad.
Amazon does keep track of many seller performance metrics, including cancellation rate. I don't know what the softer penalties are, but they can and do freeze accounts, which is obviously horrible if it is your primary income.
They don't care whether you actually have the item in hand as long as you ship it in a timely fashion.
For some reason our office manager will only order stuff off Amazon which leads to funny scenarios where we'll get 12 pack of soda that was ordered from Amazon but was shipped from Costco with the Amazon sellers name on the billing but our office as the shipping. Down at the local Kroger the 12 pack was probably 15% cheaper...
This happened to me with eBay once. Ordered a set of socket wrenches. When the box arrived at my house it had a Sears online recipet inside with my shipping address
This is what /r/flipping is about 'buy low, sell high'. There's nothing new or novel about this, some people make livings doing this sort of thing using FBA and eBay.
Similarly there is /r/churning where you use credit cards and line of credit to extract profit by strategically exploiting promotional offers.
I love this part of the video (https://youtu.be/FknkqT5tHK8?t=57). "Traffic is hades" points camera to traffic moving along nicely. I'd love to live in a place where traffic like that is "bad".
I'd think if you work remote, traffic isn't a big concern :)
I worked out of Toronto for about 2 years as a food safety inspector, which meant driving around all day. It was horrible. Traffic is so draining to your moral.
I actually made money off of an exclusive back in the GameCube day. They did The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition for the GameCube that had both games released for the NES and Nintendo 64, with the former including revised texts fixing the original mistranslations, a demo of The Wind Waker, and various promotional videos.
It was going for 50-100$ on eBay. The only way to get it was to get a subscription to Nintendo Power during the promotion so... yeah.... I was getting a few dozen Nintendo Power magazines in the mail every month for a year and pocketing 20-70$ per subscription after the sub price and eBay/PayPal fees.
Funny thing was, if people messaged me and just asked how I got the copies I flat out told them "just go get a Nintendo Power subscription".
I can't remember how I got a copy of the Collector's Edition, because I don't think I had an NP subscription. Was it a pre-order bonus for Wind Waker as well?
In any case, I found it endlessly amusing when I would go to Gamestop and see used copies of the Collector's Edition marked for sale at $50 or so. Particularly with the giant "NOT FOR RESALE" text on the cover:
>In the United Kingdom, the Collector's Edition was available to GameCube owners who mailed Nintendo proof of purchase of one of several selected GameCube games, including The Wind Waker, F-Zero GX, Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, 1080° Avalanche, Mario Party 5, and Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Consumers could also send proof of purchase of two titles from the Player's Choice range to receive the game
Yes! I got this bonus disc as a pre-order bonus for wind-waker. The "harder" version of Ocarina was a new triple A game all by itself and is still included in the Nintendo virtual console versions of the game on Switch and Gameboy from what I understand.
Wholesale usually requires you buy so many units, and it becomes hard to manage your inventory. Even if this guy couldn't sell half of these, he could return them all to his closest Walmart for only the loss of his travel. Also hot items are usually either exclusives or something you could not be a retailer of. I know there are people that buy things up on Alibaba in bulk then sell them here on Amazon and eBay...the problem is that helps counterfeiters.
I used to do support and marketing for a retail arbitrage app called Profit Bandit.
I used to invite local users out to Grocery Outlet in Portland (bargain grocery store), give them all $50 and see who found the best/most profitable stuff.
Once when testing the app at a Goodwill down the street from the office I found a book we ended up selling for around $100 (paid $3 for it).
I got stuck in line at a K-mart during its close out sale with a man that did something similar with Magic cards. He buys the yearly packs, when they’re on sale. He removes the valuable cards. Sells them independently for $10+ dollars. Due to sales and extreme sales like the close out, he makes a few grand a year. Nice work if you can get it.
To add to what /barnesto said, he also spent 12 hours manually shipping these items. He knew a lot about the product (where it would be available, prices, demand etc) so I assume he spent some time doing research.
I'd be really interested in knowing real profit on this. I'm sure it's positive, but when you factor all these costs, the per hour pay isn't "$2500 in one day!!!"
Folks should really use something like the IRS Standard Mileage Rate (Business) rather than gas, unless they're about to sell the car and it doesn't need anything before they do. In this case, 700 miles is $381.50. Still not bad, considering the order of magnitude difference between such expenses and his profit.
Regarding "time spent" -- in a hustle like this, it's not really worth thinking in terms of "$X minus time at my standard hourly rate leaves $Y profit" but rather "$X divided by time spent is my hourly rate" so time spent is not to be deducted like shipping and expenses are. Assuming one individual pocketing everything with no separate for-profit entity.
Maybe he didn't and it is just luck, classic survivor bias.
Maybe what you see is just the highlight of what is essentially a full time job. I have a friend who exploited arbitrage opportunities, and made a few thousands like this. While it is easy to see the surface, there is a lot going on behind the scenes. He sometimes spent the entire day packaging stuff, most of his travels included visits to potentially interesting shops, he has to deal with shipping problems and dishonest customers, and he had a very good knowledge of the market. And while big wins sometimes happened, most of the money were made through a large number of smaller gains. He enjoyed it when he did that, a bit less now, and he makes more through his day job (nurse), so he stopped doing it.
there are lots of FBA apps that will let you scan a bar code and tell you how much it is selling for on Amazon, and will factor in Amazon's commission, shipping costs, etc and will tell you the absolute max you can pay for an item and still make X% money off of it.
There are forums where people talk about this stuff.
Or maybe he gets the sales data (or brochures), and looks up the big discount items on amazon. Eventually you get a feel for what is a good deal. I have done this in the past with 3g/4g modems, you know how much they sell for, you know when a sale will get you a good deal.
I am surprised Walmart don't limit how many you can buy. This seems like it is priced to bring people into the store, not make a huge profit for Walmart on its own.
The guy is a hustler, I can appreciate that. He works for himself, I can appreciate that.
However if lots of other people try to do the same thing then does all the competition create a situation where lots of people are squabbling over a few crumbs? It looks like its a niche. And its only a matter of time others try to muscle in on his turf.