
Raiding Clearance Aisles and Reselling on Amazon for Profit - andrewl
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/flesh-and-blood-robots-for-amazon-they-raid-clearance-aisles-and-resell-it-all-online-for-a-profit/2019/02/08/f71bff72-2a60-11e9-984d-9b8fba003e81_story.html
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ec109685
This is an interesting gap that these resellers are filling. What Target,
Walmart and other chains should do is ship their clearance to Amazon
themselves to avoid the middleman, but I guess that isn’t possible given they
compete in other areas?

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mindslight
I suspect what they would actually do is calculate if shipping them back to
their own warehouse and selling the rest of the inventory online would make
sense. But I think what they've really done is tighten up their own logistics
(and marketing periods) to avoid shipping too many extra items out to the
stores in the first place. I remember clearance sales being much bigger back
in the day.

Today's clearance is probably still being sold above the incremental
production cost, with a rebate from the manufacturer since it wasn't sold at
full price. It doesn't matter that they're technically leaving some money on
the table - their core business is moving "fresh" stuff at higher markups.

(Also, that Monopoly thing was a different type of arbitrage than Brickseek)

