Should console scalping be illegal?

[jlauro]

IcaroRibeiro said:

AkimboCurly said:

How to solve?
1. Manufacturers could price their consoles higher to begin with, so people who value them most buy them, and drop the prices after launch period constraints are over.

2. Secondly, retailers should be allowed to price consoles. We reach ridiculous "scalper" prices of $700+ because 90-95% of the market (the retailers) is artificially forced to move at $500. The scalpers are the only ones, which I'm just assuming are 5% of the supply, allowed to adjust prices, and so are able to fairly neatly price discriminate on all the people willing to pay very high prices. If retailers were allowed to compete on price, 100% of the market would be sensitive to demand.

Wait... can't retailers charge the price they want ?

First option falls into a PR problem I guess. Microsoft and Sony both tried in the past and the outcome was disastrous 

For many things retailers can, but no the manufacturers have strict rules for consoles and for retailers that don't follow those rules can be consequences, such as no or greatly reduced inventory in the future.  Sometimes they can bend the rules with bundles.  One reason for the strict rules is they typically have smaller margins for the retailers on the console compared to other products.

It's a PR problem because they don't know how to deal with it properly.  If they don't give people a heads up then people are upset when the price drops, and if they do they risk loosing a number of sales from those ok with the higher price.  It also makes it more difficult for stores when their is a price reduction but these days they should be able to track the inventory and the manufacturer should be able to keep the stores from holding the expense of the higher cost inventory that suddenly drops in price.