I went against my own plans and bought some new next-generation hardware when I originally told myself I would wait. I just couldn't sit by watching scalpers create a volatile, overpriced market. These scumbag Scalpers are taking advantage of the masses of fellow consumers, and it motivated me to actively go and seek beating them and I was able to win two out of three times. Most of them are selling units at one-and a half times to two times the original cost. What bugs me most is that they bought them for profit and not for actual use. It reminded me of the whole 'toilet paper' crisis back in March and this type of behavior irritates me.
Over the last four weeks, I've stayed up ungodly hours to use precise timing, and precision purchasing to be able to buy both a new XBOX Series X, and a new Nvidia RTX 3070 graphics processor. Sadly, with all of my collective efforts, I could not secure a PlayStation 5. That is the one front that was too difficult to crack. The Scalpers, and their shady purchasing bots are running way too rampantly on the internet. There are cases in UK where a group of scalpers were able to adjust their Nike Shoe buying bots, and they redirected their bots to target PS5's instead. This shady Scalper group was able to buy up stock of more than 3500 individual units of PlayStation 5 for purposes of reselling at premium values. It would seem that the same thing is happening right now in Canada and the United States. No normal person can get one unless they planned ahead and pre-ordered a unit ahead of time.
I still refuse to buy a PS5 from a scalper and will wait... albeit impatiently. I hate how they are winning against consumers who wanted to buy it as a Christmas gift for someone they love, and at a reasonable price during this Holiday Season. The original retail prices are already expensive but at least the retail prices are not exorbitant and inflated like how much Scalpers are charging.
A few weeks back, while browsing Amazon.ca for PlayStation 5 units, I came across multiple listings for prices ranging as high as $ 1199.99 all the way up to $1799.99 Canadian. I went to every single post, and reported them to Amazon Services as having incorrect pricing. Since then, all of the overpriced listings have been removed. I highly doubt I was the only one that reported these, as it was visible to the entire world for at least two whole months.
If I could reach out to the thousands of people out there I would say this, "Please don't spend your hard earned money on PS5's from Scalpers. Every time one of us buys from a scalper, we just enable them to keep doing it. Wait patiently and in a few months we will all have one from a retailer at a fairer price".
Because of how the supply and demand system works, there will still likely be a shortage of Next Generation hardware until the second quarter of 2021. That would tentatively put stock levels mostly unavailable until about April. Perhaps there will be some luck and a few of us can score a PS5 unit for cheap, but for now the Scalpers have taken over and won.
Retail online websites need to implement a form of 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication) in order to stop these auto-buying AI bots from ruining everyone else's experience. One good example of 2FA would be introducing a Captcha form somewhere during the sequence of an online transaction. Captcha images usually rely on human user input to select either an image sequence, or selecting a word from analogue cursive writing style that is not using a regular text font. This helps deter AI bots and can significantly reduce the amount of non-human buyers.
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