https://www.thestar.com/amp/news/canada/2020/03/12/were-hustlers-amid-coronavirus-fears-this-couple-has-made-more-than-100000-reselling-lysol-wipes.html?__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR3_edH50rJ_kZTaAg3NhkspIRmlZUFa3-uoWUNwfe0kn1EJ_dwYkCesCwc
How people get rich. Not because they are moral and deserving, because they worship money.
By Douglas Quan Vancouver Bureau
Thu., March 12, 2020
As Manny Ranga and his wife, Violeta Perez, loaded up their Ford F-150 pickup outside a Costco near downtown Vancouver this week, some passersby couldn’t help but stop and stare.
What stood out wasn’t just the sheer volume of the couple’s purchase. It was the fact that it was all the same product: Stacks upon stacks of Lysol disinfecting wipes.
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The couple say they’ve made a bundle in the past three weeks hitting up every Costco store in the region each day, buying up as many Lysol wipes and liquid cleaners as they can — spending thousands of dollars at a time — and then reselling them, mostly on Amazon, to private individuals and companies.
Amid the growing coronavirus outbreak, the hoarding and reselling of certain household supplies to make a quick buck has become a global phenomenon, contributing to frenzied panic buying by shoppers who’ve been fed a steady diet of images of empty store shelves on social media.
Ranga, 38, said one six-pack of wipes that goes for $20 at Costco can fetch four times that online. (A check of Amazon on Thursday showed that a six-pack was going for $89 under their seller name “Violeta & Sons Trading Ltd.”)
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The government in Japan, meanwhile, reportedly introduced new rules making the reselling of face masks for profit a crime punishable by a one-year jail term or a hefty fine.
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Retailers can always exercise informal supply management by limiting how much of a product can be bought at one time, he said. While there are laws aimed at addressing “unconscionable pricing,” government authorities will typically only intervene if they know that vital safety interests of the public are being compromised.
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