
He Has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them - danso
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-purell-wipes-amazon-sellers.html
======
crazygringo
On the one hand, I'm a big believer in the market, and that rising costs in
times of scarcity prevent individuals from buying more than they need. And if
Uber charges 20x for a ride on New Year's Eve, fine -- that's just what
happens with supply and demand.

BUT -- it feels like a big problem when a few profiteers are _creating_ that
very scarcity in the first place. I don't mind this guy buying a bunch of kits
in bulk liquidation... but driving around to empty every store of its shelves?
That _really_ rubs me the wrong way. Same as when ticket resellers buy huge
chunks of concert tickets to arbitrage, _creating_ the sold-out situation.

But it still confuses me how there is _zero_ hand sanitizer on Amazon right
now. Why isn't this guy selling it at least for a non-gouging price? Purell
will surely come back in stock in a couple of weeks, no? Now is literally the
only time for him recoup his investment... while spending a couple weeks
packing, labeling and shipping nonstop.

Why is he sitting still?

~~~
lloda
There is a much more effective way to prevent people from buying more than
they need... limit sales to x items per buyer, or rationing. The only thing
rising costs ensure is that people without money don't get anything.

~~~
baryphonic
It's not so simple. What do you say to the family with seven kids who also has
grandma and grandpa living at home? Do they get only one bottle of sanitizer
the same as the college student? For some people, time is more valuable than
money; for others, the opposite is true; and in even other cases, other
structural issues will make fairness very difficult to achieve. Someone will
lose out in all of these scenarios, and therefore it's quite difficult to
evaluate which regime is preferable to the others in all cases.

~~~
crazygringo
For a store it really _is_ that simple, and they do it all the time with
really good sales (esp. loss-leaders).

The "preferable" regime is whichever one is easy to implement, appears fair,
and ensures primarily that the store has a reputation for things being in-
stock even when on sale.

Which is usually max 1, 2 or 4 per customer. If you _really_ want more, you
can usually put them in your car, go back in, get in line again and pay again.
If you do this more than two or three times, a manager will probably ask you
to stop and prevent any further. But you can always come back tomorrow.

It works pretty well. People who really need double or triple can get it with
just a little extra work, but it absolutely prevents people from clearing out
the store's stock in a single, quick easy transaction.

~~~
baryphonic
This response did not answer the core question of my comment: any allocation
scheme will choose winners and losers, so how do you pick which is worse? I
see an assertion that rationing via quotas is "simple and fair," but it's not
clear at all that it is more fair. What is "fair," and according to whom?
Certainly the mother with seven kids and elderly parents in the home, she'd
find the "go through the line, go to your car and go back in again" to be
totally unacceptable, especially with the exceptionally long lines we've seen
(it wouldn't be a "little extra work" but would involve doing nothing but
waiting in line for hours).

And the whole point of this article is that it's not normal times where prices
can fluctuate.

~~~
ashwoods
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. In every game you have winners and
losers, but you _can_ try to make the game fairer for most people.

------
nyc_pizzadev
Those 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer were better off staying in their
respective stores and being sold off in their surrounding communities. Unless
the gov steps in, I don't see needed supplies like this, masks, medicines,
etc, being distributed fairly to everyone in the market. Rather profiteers
will get their access and sell off to hoarders. The comfort of having access
to some of these supplies, even if they are not effective, goes a long way.

~~~
_jal
> being distributed fairly to everyone in the market

Of course. Courts and parents are supposed to be fair, the market isn't.
Market dynamics are useless in the face of a pandemic - the virus is not a
market participant and has no conception of property rights.

On a sinking ship, bailing water out out of only your cabin is a pretty stupid
plan.

------
sanj
“ Current price-gouging laws “are not built for today’s day and age,” Mr.
Colvin said. “They’re built for Billy Bob’s gas station doubling the amount he
charges for gas during a hurricane.””

That is _exactly_ what he is doing.

~~~
Arnt
Do you happen to know _why_ these laws apply to a few named categories (not
including what he wants to sell) rather than everything, and _why_ they apply
only when the relevant states declare an emergency?

I don't mean why you think they should do so, or might, but do you know the
actual reasoning applied by the legislatures at the time of enactment?

------
pseudolus
FYI, the World Health Organization has published a guide to the local
production of hand sanitizer. [0]. There also numerous other recipes available
online. While there are retail shortages of hand sanitizer, bulk quantities of
ethanol and isopropyl alcohol are readily available directly from
manufacturers and third-party sites like ebay.

[0]
[https://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/Guide_to_Local_Production.pdf](https://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/Guide_to_Local_Production.pdf)

------
ikeboy
Several thoughts:

1\. The point about them not actually making that much buying for $2 and
selling for $20 is 100% valid. Amazon fees are $3, plus another $10 or so for
shipping, plus labor, box, label, gas, etc.

2\. On top of that, the business is risky, as evidenced by the fact that he's
stuck with the products now. If you have a 50% chance of getting stuck with
inventory, you need to make double the mark-up (actually more to account for
purchase price) to cover that risk.

3\. Obviously he was somewhat naive about talking to the NYT. The reporter
clearly has a lot more experience spinning and extracting unfavorable quotes
than he has with resisting hostile questioning. Disclaimer - I talked to the
same reporter
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22575940](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22575940)
I wrote about my own experience here), and I've also talked to and met both
Matt and Chris at various conferences over the years.

4\. If you look at the pricing charts, everything was basically normal until
1-2 weeks ago. There was a small increase which is reasonable with the
increase in demand. At that point, there was nothing wrong with buying from
stores or liquidators and reselling. The article says Matt bought this stuff
up in February, which is before any states of emergency were announced, before
demand blew up, etc. I think there's a distinction to be made between people
going to stores and buying now, and people who did that a month ago.

------
nabla9
Price gouging (The practice of raising prices on certain types of goods and
services to an unfair level, especially during a state of emergency) can be
crime during civil emergencies.

If you don't have laws and rules based society, you might be killed for doing
that. 100 year ago this guy could easily get a beating or tarring and
feathering type punishment.

It's amazing that some person can do that and don't think that they might be
doing something really wrong, at least ethically. He want's publicity for his
stunt.

------
GBiT
In Lithuania, Gov allowed for some Alcoholic drink factories to make
Sanitizer. One factory doing 30 tons a day of Sanitizer and starting shipping
it asap. Others are smaller, but about 14 factories doing it full time. Within
week, the market will be full.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
A very interesting out of the box solution to the problem.

~~~
maxerickson
Isn't it just straightforward and sensible to use available production
capacity?

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
Of course, but this kind of behavior in terms of utilizing private enterprises
for public good like how you describe is pretty much anathema in US and hasn’t
been done since WWII. It’s a fantastic idea, but not something the US public
seems able to readily accept.

If you could sell it in a way that convinced the CEO’s of these companies that
they would get even richer over it, however, it would happen tomorrow.

------
asab
> Mr. Colvin is sitting on 17,700 bottles of the stuff

> Mr. Colvin does not believe he was price gouging. While he charged $20 on
> Amazon for two bottles of Purell that retail for $1 each

> “If I can make a slight profit, that’s fine,” he said. “But I’m not looking
> to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that
> guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times
> what they cost me.”

~~~
ardy42
>> “If I can make a slight profit, that’s fine,” he said. “But I’m not looking
to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that
guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what
they cost me.”

That quote is out of context. He was hoping to make a _large_ profit selling
anonymously on Amazon. Now that he's been blocked from doing that, he has to
try to break even selling locally (and surprise, surprise, he's much more
concerned about his reputation when doing that).

I think this quote from him captures his situation much better:

> “It’s been a huge amount of whiplash,” he said. “From being in a situation
> where what I’ve got coming and going could potentially put my family in a
> really good place financially to ‘What the heck am I going to do with all of
> this?’”

------
onion2k
He claims his actions would put him in a really good place financially, and
later claims he isn't making much profit. That's some impressive cognitive
dissonance.

~~~
cdolan
And this gem at the end:

“But I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the
news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m
selling for 20 times what they cost me.”

------
_ph_
This kind of behavior was already quite aggravating before the pandemic.
Whenever something new comes to the market in potentially limited quantities,
"clever" people start buying up stock from the stores just to put it on ebay
etc., causing the product to be unavailable for any reasonable customer.

This is annoying enough, when it concerns an item you just would like to be
able to buy, but when it concerns items, that people depend on, and be it as
simple as toilet paper, I think this should be prosecuted as criminal
behavior.

------
keiferski
This guy needs to do the following:

1\. Sell the hand-sanitizers for a penny each to build goodwill.

2\. Set up a Kickstarter to make back his losses.

Otherwise, he is going to get some serious grief from his community and end up
like Martin Shkreli.

~~~
harambae
>end up like Martin Shkreli

fabulously wealthy and with a hot russian girlfriend?

~~~
keiferski
> Shkreli was charged in federal court, then convicted on two counts of
> securities fraud and one count of conspiring to commit securities fraud. In
> 2018, Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in federal prison and up to $7.4
> million in fines.

------
someguydave
I don’t mind people selling stuff at high prices if it is in demand. I do mind
front-running the population by buying uhaul-sized piles of supplies. I blame
the stores he bought from - they should have refused to sell obviously in-
demand items to one person in that quantity.

~~~
jmull
Stores don't have any mechanism to stop people from buying things.

Not to mention, a buyer can just do something like claim to be getting these
for the ER 30 miles down the road. So what's a good store to do then?

~~~
etrautmann
Many stores will put in place per customer limits for critical (or likely to
sell out) items. It's not unreasonable to say 2 bottles of sanitizer max per
customer...

~~~
jmull
Ok, I should have said they have only low-efficiency, purely reactive high-
latency mechanisms to prevent people from buying things.

A store needs to experience a run on merchandise and also (through some other
information channel) come to understand that this is actually a bad enough
thing to override their normal business imperatives to sell the stuff they
have.

Blaming stores for sales they make today makes some sense. Blaming stores for
sales they made last week does not.

~~~
someguydave
The stores should be allowed to raise prices in the face of increased demand,
but the average voter thinks that is some form of theft. So stores can only
implement quantity limits.

------
p4bl0
The public health authority should just requisition all of the masks and hand
sanitizers this irresponsible guy has to make good use of it.

------
massysett
This guy did something that at a minimum will make him a pariah in his
community and at worst could get him convicted of crimes in several states,
yet he didn’t hesitate to have his name, picture, and complete confession
plastered nationwide in one of the country’s premier and most widely read
newspapers. Head-scratcher.

~~~
zenonu
We (the guy in the article and myself) live in a nation where insurance
companies would rather see you die than pay out, insulin is $350/bottle when
it's $7 to produce, and politicians that we elect are entirely for it all. We
have ourselves to blame for setting the moral standard.

~~~
listsfrin
If it's $7 to produce why there are no new companies that sell it for $100?
They'd make quite some profit.

~~~
hawkice
Intense regulatory barriers.

For a longer comment from a healthcare worker of note, see section 2 here:
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/30/buspirone-shortage-
in-...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/30/buspirone-shortage-in-
healthcaristan-ssr/)

~~~
listsfrin
What do we understand from this?

~~~
hawkice
Probably that if someone wants to make cheap lifesaving medicine they should
have an easy way to do that instead of a Kafkaesque hellscape to navigate, but
I'm not sure that insight generalizes beyond "make good things easy".

~~~
listsfrin
We understand that currently it costs a lot more than $7 to produce insulin.

------
mantap
This is stupid on two levels. The first is that obviously this guy is a crook,
profiteering from a crisis.

The second is that hand sanitizer isn't even necessary, soap and water is
better, and people paying $7 for a bottle of hand sanitizer are ignorant when
they could just buy a bar of soap.

~~~
XorNot
Hand sanitizer is really useful in office's and when you're out and about at
the moment though.

You basically can't get out of an office bathroom without realistically
touching several surfaces of questionable cleanliness for a contagious
pathogen, for example.

~~~
huntertwo
Takes 4 minutes of hand sanitizer to remove viruses.

~~~
XorNot
Most sources [1] say that alcohol-based hand sanitizer can deactivate
targetable viruses within 30s. The CDC recommendations for coronavirus are to
apply a suitable amount and take at least 20s to spread it over your hands
completely.

Coronavirus's are a class of viruses well known to be susceptible to
deactivation by alcohol exposure [2].

1\.
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019567011...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195670117304693)

2\. [https://www.livescience.com/how-long-coronavirus-last-
surfac...](https://www.livescience.com/how-long-coronavirus-last-
surfaces.html)

------
guerrilla
I may be mistaken but I think the state of emergency declarations actually
made price gouging universally illegal, which he probably should have expected
even if eBay, Amazon and that AG hadn't acted on their own.

------
ausbah
the sense of self entitled heroism near the end is truly amazing

------
pianom4n
These are clearly the good guys, and it's _because_ you hate them.

Stores refuse to raise prices because customers will dislike them and it will
harm them in the long run. People like this take the reputation hit (and are
financially rewarded) for keeping the market liquid, which is a _good thing_!

Anti-gouging laws are the problem here, and there's no doubt about it. There's
not a "real" shortage, non of the usual arguments even apply, it's mostly a
short-term run which would be easily stopped if prices could just.

~~~
charles_f
Wow that's a borderline religious faith in the market. People are humans and
some are not able to drop $80 in a bottle of freaking Purrel, which they need
to protect themselves as much as to prevent spreading their germs.

This is a public health issue, counting on market liquidity and total
inflation to fix it probably isn't the right approach.

------
nyc_pizzadev
I guess the other scenario here is that manufacturers of soaps, sanatizers,
and masks/gloves are drasticly ramping up production to meet this demand. In
hopefully short time, the market will be flooded, guys like this are washed
out, and if corona is the new normal for the next 6, 12, or 24 months, then
the public will be in much better shape to combat the threat and return to
semi normal.

------
rsynnott
Er, good? Will serve as a warning to the next one.

------
scarface74
Ethical considerations aside, why not just set up a website and sell it
himself? Have we become that dependent on the big platforms?

~~~
jmull
Almost no one would find his web site, and if they did, they probably would
not give him their credit card details (probably a good idea, too).

~~~
scarface74
People have loss all sense of hustle. As far as exposure, there are FaceBook
and Google ads.

You can do credit cards through PayPal or even use the Web Payments API that
let you do secure payments on the web via a company like Stripe and that will
work with Apple and Google Pay.

~~~
robjan
It's not really about sense of hustle. The problem is on the demand side, not
the supply side. The vast majority of people would not trust a fly-by-night
website selling hand sanitisers at elevated price.

~~~
scarface74
As opposed to trusting fly by night third party sellers on Amazon who have not
been vetted.

It’s not like Amazon has a sterling reputation for selling legitimate goods.

~~~
robjan
Amazon has a bad reputation but in almost all cases issues are resolved
quickly. Nobody is going to write about their good experience with Amazon.

~~~
scarface74
Resolving an issue is only helpful if you know that you have a fake good. For
instance it was widely reported that companies were selling defective helmets
and that people didn’t know until after their loved ones were in a fatal
accident.

If you do know the goods are fake and you pay with a credit card, you dispute
it with your credit card company.

~~~
robjan
Okay, so how is this a problem that exists with Amazon and not the
hypothetical website that this man should have set up? We're starting to go
off on a bit of a tangent here.

~~~
scarface74
The problem exists either way. Amazon vs third party website doesn’t give you
any more or less assurances.

------
jshaqaw
Are we supposed to have sympathy for a war profiteer

------
coretx
This guy should deploy a "Pay what you want when you want" model.

>> Society helped. >> Eventual HUGE profits.

Good people c.q people able and willing to pay outnumber "bad" people or
people who can't afford it by a huge margin. Can't go wrong!

------
mnm1
I guess he never thought of hiring a developer to put up a shopping site for
his items? This could be done in a few days using something like Woocommerce
or Magento. Can't say I feel sorry for the guy though.

------
jacknews
har har serves them right

they didn't create anything (except shortages where these things are needed),
they don't deserve anything (except profitering charges)

------
baryphonic
All I can say is, "OOOOOF!"

First, thks guy _desperately_ needs PR - his hero self-image makes him look
even worse than Shkreli. In this case, all they'd need to say is that Mr
Corvin is interested in moving products in areas with low demand, such as
rural Tennessee and Kentucky, to people in desperate need in areas with high
demand like the big coastal cities or for example those with certain immune
disorders. That's all they should say.

Second, let's try to separate feelings for the person (Corvin) from the
activity (price gouging). When there's a shortage between quantity demanded
and the quantity supplied, there has to be some form of quantity restriction,
whether that involves price increases, queueing, quotas or even lotteries. The
alternatives are not a person buying sanitizer for $10/bottle on Amazon versus
$1/bottle at Safeway, but between $10/bottle on Amazon versus either not
getting it, waiting in a long queue at a store (which is counterproductive to
social distancing), having some sort of quantity restriction (which is really
lousy for people buying for more than just themselves). It's not clear to me
at first glance which is worse.

Ultimately, the shortage problem can only be mitigated by additional
production or a return to pre-crisis demand. There are probably quite a few
producers who could temporarily retool in order to produce sanitizer or other
supplies that are in high demand, but this would be costly and risky and
disrupt their supply chains and distribution. They could only justify the move
with significantly higher prices than the pre-crisis market price. Any such
firms would be crazy to do this, given the legal proscription and moral
outrage incumbent with price increases during a crisis. There might be a few
firms that try to enter as a PR move, and maybe in some places, the government
will subsidize production of demanded goods at a low price, but these are not
sustainable options. By having a very absolutist stance against price gouging,
we are preventing the potentially ameliorating effects of additional
production albeit at a higher price.

Third, I am a little disgusted with the NYT for publishing this story. While
they can't be blamed for Corvin's diarrhea of the mouth, they did find the
person to profile who is maximally unsympathetic person to the NYT's audience:
ex-military, lives in the South (and judging by his yard, a hillbilly), not
well-educated and has a job (Amazon reseller) that is low status. It may be
newsworthy that someone in rural Tennessee has 17k bottles of sanitizer, but I
can easily imagine the sort of entrapping questions that the reporter used
with this guy, and it makes me, well, irritated. (Anyone who has had
experience with a hostile reporter and went in unprepared knows what I'm
talking about.) The NYT is taking advantage of this crisis to drive outrage
clicks, just as much as this guy is taking advantage to profiteer. In the
process, they're making this guy the public face of "price gouging" during
COVID-19, despite him being very much a private person unprepared for the
scorn about to be unleashed on him and his family.

I think the best way out of this is for someone with charitable intent and the
monetary means to buy up his supply close to at-cost (I'd guess $40-50k), and
then distribute them to particularly vulnerable people at low prices or even
gratis. Corvin himself could maybe do that. If he did have a change of heart,
I somehow doubt the NYT would cover it so prominently, if at all. For the sake
of all parties, I hope I'm wrong.

~~~
ikeboy
I talked to this reporter, although my quote didn't make it into the article.
About halfway through, he asked me my thoughts on the morality of selling face
masks when the government was recommending against hoarding, and I realized it
was a gotcha question, which I dodged.

Afterwards, I sent him this message:

>I thought a bit more about your morality question re governments asking
people not to buy masks, and on second thought I'd answer as follows:

>The government's interests are not necessarily the same as individuals.
Clearly the masks have some utility or the government wouldn't want them for
their own healthcare workers. Is it moral for the government to ask me to go
without a mask and expose myself to some additional risk to further the
government's interests? Is it immoral for someone to refuse such a request?
Clearly people are willing to pay for masks, and if they value the masks more
than the government does (which they do if they're willing to pay more than
the government is paying), then why is it more moral for those masks to go to
the government?

>The government can easily corner the market on masks if they choose to do so.
Declare publicly they'll pay $X/mask, buy up all masks, and give them out at
their own convenience. If they choose not to do so, I don't think it's immoral
for private businesses to help private individuals obtain the masks they want,
even if the government would prefer to get their hands on more.

>I believe I saw a figure of 3.5 billion masks that the US is trying to
acquire over the next year or so. Do the math. If they want to get 350 million
in the next month, they can offer $5-10/mask and would easily corner the
market.

>I do happen to think it's flagrantly immoral for the government to restrict
testing capacity, as your paper recently documented

>In light of that and other incompetence from the US government, it's hardly
unreasonable for people to be skeptical of guidance saying that people
shouldn't wear masks.

>And even if it's true that wearing masks has little utility now, it can still
be rational to buy masks now for use in the near future. If this spreads
further and the shortage gets worse, which is possible, buying masks now will
seem brilliant in retrospect.

------
frenchman99
Paywall.

~~~
strickjb9
NY Times is giving free access to articles re: Coronavirus. You just have to
sign up -- even via Social sign-in, it's two clicks.

~~~
tjoff
Hah

"Even via Social sign-in" ...

Really?! How generous of them.

Not even worth a bugmenot attempt.

------
hatenberg
Awww poor price gouging end stage capitalist. Not.

------
gerardnll
Social scourge. Capitalism at its highest.

