As I noted "Buying lots of things in order to resell them is more complicated than buying just one or two things for yourself". Both of the links you provided to cheaper sellers are not set up for bulk sales. The one on Amazon has a link for buying in bulk, but that only goes up to 999, and if you put 999 in for the quantity in their bulk page, it won't let you because they only have less than 100 pcs available. And the aliexpress link has a hard limit of 1 per customer. These are not reliable wholesalers, and when you're sourcing for retail, you need reliable wholesalers. When you're sourcing wholesalers for retail, you need someone that you can buy from in bulk repeatedly. Often you also want a wholesaler who'll let you set up payment terms (net-60 is pretty common) so you don't have to pay for the inventory up front. I'm fairly confident that if you looked and found a bulk wholesaler for this item that offers terms, the per unit cost is going to be closer to the Adafruit price than to the Aliexpress price you quoted. And then Adafruit marks it up, not to "prey on well meaning but clueless electronics hobbyists" but to cover the costs of doing business, like any retailer. These costs include shipping-from-wholesaler, warehousing, preparing when the item purchased is not in the final sellable state, adding photos and copy to website, adding educational resources, etc etc. Some of the costs are one-time costs and some are ongoing costs or recurring costs. Running a retail business isn't cheap, especially in the US. Note that LOAMLIN and Xnbada (the two "companies" behind the links you provided) have zero web presence beyond storefronts on Amazon and/or Aliexpress. I can't even tell you where they're shipping from (though it's highly likely it's China or somewhere else where labor is very cheap), let alone who owns/runs them. There's no accountability whatsoever besides the comments on their listings, which doesn't mean much these days. There's no product support besides _maybe_ being able to return (to China?) for a refund. If you're OK with all of that, then yes, buying from them makes more sense for you. But that still doesn't mean that Adafruit is price gouging.
>I'm fairly confident that if you looked and found a bulk wholesaler for this item that offers terms, the per unit cost is going to be closer to the Adafruit price than to the Aliexpress price you quoted.
Confidently incorrect.
We're talking about Adafruit gouging hobbyists. Not wholesale bulk purchasing.
For the average person buying a few or a dozen rolls of LEDs, Adafruit is the worst possible choice of vendor. Paying ridiculous prices for the same exact product is insanity.
Your tome trying to justify it is just tl;dr; nonsense. I'm sorry but it just is.
>But that still doesn't mean that Adafruit is price gouging.
Yes, they definitely are price gouging, and your mental gymnastics don't change that at all.
We're really done here, you obviously have an agenda and no amount of obvious proof will convince you of anything that might shatter your nonsensical world view. I'm not interested in you moving goalposts anywhere you want to win pointless internet arguments. Have a nice night.
I'm not moving goalposts. For this entire time I've been trying to explain why a situation can arise like this one where Adafruit, a US company, ends up selling something for more money than some no-name Chinese sellers, and that it's not price gouging just because they're selling it for more money.
The only explanation I can think of for your strong opposition to what I'm explaining is that I think you might be working with a different definition of "price gouging" than is commonly accepted. Price gouging is when a seller raises prices unnecessarily due to an increase in demand or a decrease in supply (like when some places raised the price of toilet paper early during the covid pandemic). I've repeatedly tried explaining why that is not what's happening in Adafruit's case -- Adafruit's prices are a result of the fact that they're a very different business than no-name Chinese sellers on Aliexpress and the costs that they're getting goods for can be higher due to their needs (this is why I was talking about the wholesalers that Adafruit deals with). It's perfectly rational and not "mental gymnastics" -- this is common business. This is also why most stores that are not national chains have higher prices than national chains (and Amazon, for that matter, though that's messier since they also have third party sellers). Again, this isn't price gouging -- they just can't get the goods they sell for as cheap prices as national chains.
>and that it's not price gouging just because they're selling it for more money.
We're not talking a few cents or dollars more. We're talking about more than 5x more the price of what they actually should cost.
You can call it whatever you want, but Adafruit prices are ridiculous. I gave one example of many. Go ahead and throw your money away if you really want to, I don't care.
You absolutely are doing mental gymnastics to try to justify 5x price difference, when they get the LEDs from China. It's the same stuff.
Nothing you can do can explain this, so just give up. I'm done with this, you're wasting my time with your tl;dr;s
