I completely agree with that. If someone offered to pay me 3x the price for my console, I would accept it. Are scalpers the nicest people in the world? No.. but capitalism is designed to reward greed.. so hating on scalpers whilst enjoying the luxuries of the economic system is being picky. It's really just a product of supply and demand

I actually own two physical copies, one is not opened. I didn't mean to buy two, I ordered one online and forgot about it and then purchased a copy at a retailer. I decided to keep the extra copy though.

Exactly.  And if people stopped paying over MSRP and forced scalpers to eat their investment, the practice would die immediately.  But as it stands, as an example, ps5 scalpers are being rewarded + incentivized.  Why would they stop when they are making money hand over fist.  

Anyone who buys this game from scalpers is an idiot. There are more copies of this game in the wild now than many games sell in a lifetime. Scalpers are just trying to take advantage of people who do not know any better and panic buyers. The prices for this will drop before we know it, leaving some people with major buyer's remorse.

The problem with PS5 and XSX/S scalpers is not the capitalism aspect of it.  It is the fact that they are using bots to buy up all the stock im seconds, which is a violation of ToS for these retailers.  They do this to create artificial demand, and drive up the prices even further and preventing actual consumers from being able to purchase a console without them.

It is not the scalping itself that is scummy, but that fact that they are essentially breaking the law to do it under the guise of "capitalism" that makes them all pieces of shit.

EDIT: To clarify, while violating ToS itself is not a crime punishable by law...bypassing technical or code-based barriers intended to limit access to or uses of a website may violate California's computer crime law.  The fact that these bots bypass the bot checks is what brings legality into question.

It certainly is a dirty tactic and I don't like it.  But I think the easiest solution is to have a scalper buy 10 ps5 units and end up having to sell them for $400 and lose $1,000.  It would end this nonsense quickly.  But instead scalpers are able to sell their inventory for $1000 each.  We need to cut off the incentives for said dirty tactics.  

For scalping my only real issue are the greedy people. Someone buying one of something and selling it for a profit is fine but buying several using bots is a bad practice. Though even in the latter case I can't hold it against people that much since enriching yourself for an easier life is how the world works and there are far worse ways to enrich yourself than taking advantage of scarcity of luxury goods. I was kinda considering buying a copy of 3D All Stars and then try to sell it for a profit but then quickly decided against it since I don't want to support Nintendo's actions. I'm against governments getting involved but stores taking measures to prevent bots buying up supply is fine by me.

Oh your not wrong, I hope they all lose money.  If people were more patient and did not buy from them, this problem would not exist.

I am just saying that the guise of "capitalism" that people like to bring up is not a valid argument when they are breaking ToS and bypassing web security to buy everything up in seconds, and artificially inflating demand.  There is no logical way for anyone to defend this, and everyone doing it deserves to lose money.

So my point was not to imply that we the people couldn't stop them if more of us had better self control, because we certainly could.  My point was that given how scalpers are doing things, we shouldn't have to because they are abusing the system in first place.

Agreed as I talked about in my earlier posts, the method of acquisition via bots is the problem and is what differentiates this form of scalping from normal trading buying and selling patterns of supply constrained items because it is no longer just a natural product of the changes in supply and demand, the use of bots manipulates the market by exacerbating the shortage and drives up prices far beyond normal buying and selling practices.

So glad i'm not and never going to be a scalper.