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Robotics United States

'Cyber Grinches' Snatching Toys Should Be Stopped, Lawmakers Say (bloomberg.com) 161

Posted by msmash from the fighting-back dept.
A group of Democrats wants to stop the Grinch from stealing Christmas. Except this time around the spoilsport they're targeting is not a furry green creature, but a robot. From a report: Lawmakers including Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chuck Schumer introduced a bill to crack down on "cyber Grinches" using bots to quickly snap up entire inventories of popular holiday toys and resell them at higher prices. Their actions could make some of the items almost impossible to buy, the politicians say, exacerbating shortages sparked by supply chain woes.
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'Cyber Grinches' Snatching Toys Should Be Stopped, Lawmakers Say More

'Cyber Grinches' Snatching Toys Should Be Stopped, Lawmakers Say

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  • you can find them on ebay for way over MSPR!

  • Nothing more important? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Monday November 29, 2021 @04:25PM (#62030969) Homepage
    Do they have nothing more important to worry about? National debt? Health care? The massive political divide? Anything? Bots buying PS5's is something for companies to deal with.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by e3m4n ( 947977 )
      ever since the tickle-me-elmo I have been saying they should use scalping laws. Why is it that they protect the typical basketball patron by throwing scalpers in jail for hawking tickets for a huge markup, but not the asshole that chose to charge $400 for a $40 tickle-me-elmo? It seems like its even more offensive since the point is to rip off some kid or kids parent. I dont think they need a new law. Charge them under the exact same law they prosecute scalpers for. Follow the ad in the paper and stage a st

      • On the other hand if someone is willing to pay $400 for it, why shouldn't the shop raise the price and why shouldn't someone profit.
        The toy is not life-saving medicine, nobody needs it to survive. I would get angry at the scalper if this was insulin or something like that. But a toy or a video card? Yeah, I would like to get them cheaper, but if someone bought them first, whatever. If I don't like the price I can use my old cards.

        • If they are going to arrest ticket scalpers, they should arrest toy scalpers. Its not like you will die if you miss your New Kids on the Block concert either. I see your point but enforcing laws discriminately is also wrong. If we are going to crack down on ticket markups because it disenfranchises people of lower incomes, the same argument should apply to toys. Why is it only rich white kids get their santa wish? A $30 toy shouldnt sell for $200-$400. Then the omly people that can check off the wishlist of

          • people go in debt they shouldnt go into

            People going in debt for a toy....

            Since the toys get cheaper after Christmas, maybe Santa could bring the kid a note saying that some elf is lazy and did not make his toy in time, so he will get it, but a bit later. The lazy elf will give the toy to the kid's dad when he finishes it. Or something like that.

            I don't like scalpers (or, what they were called in the USSR - speculants - buying something and selling it for more money; Everything had price stamped on it at the factory), but I also think people enab

      • Unless it's a necessity, let scalpers scalp ... it's not like mass-produced music and plastic toy trinkets are really necessary for anything other than filling landfills and making people dumber.

    • Government is involved in everything. Whatever your political views, that's a simple reality. There's a healthcare bureaucracy for healthcare. There's an education bureaucracy for education. There's military bureaucracy. There's environmental bureaucracy. There's a finance bureaucracy.

      Somewhere in there is consumer protection. That's there job to look at things to make sure the business environment is good. It takes away nothing from the other bureaucracies.

      There are certain problems that used to be just mi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by crow ( 16139 )

      Yes, they have more important things to deal with, but so what? Addressing some other issue doesn't necessarily slow them down on other things. In fact, it can help build relationships that make addressing more important issues easier. And since they will never agree as to what the one most important issue is, they would never get anything done at all if they refused to work on anything else.

    • Do they have nothing more important to worry about? National debt? Health care? The massive political divide? Anything? Bots buying PS5's is something for companies to deal with.

      Ya, but people have short political memories and bot toy buying won't move the needle much anyway, so they can work on it now. They'll want to drag those other things out through the mid-term, and possibly 2024, elections for maximum effect. /cynical

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Good point, the government can only do one thing at a time so it should only consider the biggest priorities.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 )

        the government can only do one thing at a time

        That's giving them a lot of credit. They have spent an inordinate amount of time and effort to prove that they can, in fact, do nothing.

        • Be honest, when you look at what comes out of them doing something, wouldn't you actually prefer if they did nothing?

    • nobody has the political capital to solve any of those things. The country is too divided on how to solve them.

      This is an attempt to address inflation. Yes, everyone's focused on PS5s, but the scalping market is much bigger than that, and they scalp literally everything. It's become an entire industry, like Ticketmaster. And I'd love to see it nipped in the bud before it gets big enough to buy off Senators...

      • Why? As long as it isn't essential products, I don't see the issue. You don't "need" these items. Really, we should roll back the ticketBastard rule about no scalping tickets. Clearly they aren't being sold at the price the market will bear (or is it bare?).

        I go to a decent amount of concerts. Want a good price, then make sure you know when the pre-sale starts and be there. Saves us a fortune compared to trying to buy tickets spur of the moment.

        I guess we can't expect people that *MUST* see the show to both

    • Do they have nothing more important to worry about? National debt? Health care? The massive political divide? Anything? Bots buying PS5's is something for companies to deal with.

      The bot operators are often linked to organized crime or hostile nation states. They have sophisticated operations, well tuned to grab up consoles and sneakers today. However, they did the same to PPE, hand santizer, toilet paper, ivermectin, and hydroxychloroquine. Fortunately, it wasn't the sophisticated operations because they were caught off guard, but are you confident it won't happen in the future?

      So imagine if they tuned the resources they apply to grabbing play stations and sneakers towards med

      • Aren't those medicines usually prescription-only? I think it's also limited how much you can buy with the prescription at one time (maybe because they can be used to make illegal drugs or just so that the person does not distribute the medicine to people without prescription).

        At least it's how this works in my country. Even with a prescription, I cannot just buy a pallet of some medicine and the doctor cannot just make a prescription that says "take a pill every minute" in an attempt to justify why I want t

        • That's how it works in the USA as well. Sure, there was some assholes in 2020 March buying all the hand sanitizer up. Pretty sure a few of them got into trouble and others got totally stuck with all their products because the online market place refused to let them sell their *essential* items.

          We aren't talking about anything essential here.

          If I cared more, I'd likely run my own bot to try for deals on hot items so I too could flip them, but I'm just not that concerned about making the extra money I guess.

          N

          • They could actually demand ID for the sale

            I can see some people having a problem with that for political reasons, but providing an ID to an online place is a bit of a hassle (I assume it would work like KYC for trading sites and cryptocurrency exchanges).

            and also make it so your items in your cart don't get bought up. It's a problem with a technical fix but why would the online market site care who buys what? They win either way.

            They are almost guaranteed to sell everything if they allow the bots. OTOH, maybe the store could have a price increase if you buy more than a certain number of the same item.

            However, while I don't like scalpers, what if the person buying many items at once is not a scalper. After all, I can buy a

    • Do they have nothing more important to worry about? National debt? Health care? The massive political divide? Anything?

      You asked for dinner table issues...well 3 seconds after Thanksgiving, Consumer Spending as a mass critical event for America is certainly one of them, where Buying Shit is practically the American gig job in the month of December.

      And that massive political divide is distraction by design. They don't exactly see that as some kind of "problem" to fix.

      Bots buying PS5's is something for companies to deal with.

      Like political divide, find me a retailer who's really worried about the "problem" of too many sales.

      Now you know why the American Association for the Entitle

    • Maybe he's listening to people instead of lobbyists?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by khchung ( 462899 )

      Do they have nothing more important to worry about?

      Of course not. They only care about being re-elected, nothing else matters.

      National debt? Health care? The massive political divide? Anything?

      Only if those, for the same effort, could sway the voters as much as caring about bots buying PS5s.

  • Lobbyists for fat cats at play? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Monday November 29, 2021 @04:26PM (#62030971) Journal

    This smells like big companies trying to keep mom-and-pop retailers out of the loop. I'm not sure it's even possible to monitor and enforce such, unless there's some kind of national toy tracking database, or the like. That's a waste of gov't resources; spend the labor on Covid issues instead.

    Give the kids carboard boxes, scissors, paper, and crayons; they can build cities, action figures, and rocket-ships with such. You don't need fancy dancy shit ASAP. Nobody will die if the e-gizmo arrives in February.

    In short, fix real problems first.

    • Re:Lobbyists for fat cats at play? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Monday November 29, 2021 @04:45PM (#62031047)

      That's a waste of gov't resources; spend the labor on Covid issues

      Presuming (a) the Government can't do more than one thing at a time and/or (2) the issues involving COVID and bot toy buying overlap at that level. I'm pretty sure that (a) they can and (b) they don't.

      In short, fix real problems first.

      This is a real problem for some people. How important a problem is another matter. But, like scalping tickets, it's a problem for regular people.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      So back in the day I overpaid for CDs and books to support a local store. I knew the owners they had to pay full wholesale, which meant they had to charge list. Larger retailers get a discount off wholesale. The extreme example of this was blockbuster, when it existed, getting movies almost for free while independent renters has to pay full price.

      This is not that. It is primal competition, having stuff others do not. Parents who find bragging about the fact thier kids has an Xbox more fulfilling than rais

    • to control inflation. It seems silly, because there are better ways to tackle inflation, but Schumer doesn't have the political capital to do those, and the Republicans would block him if he tries (since if Schumer fails it helps the Republicans in the mid-terms and beyond).

      TL;DR; better to do what you can than fret over what you can't.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      This smells like big companies trying to keep mom-and-pop retailers out of the loop.

      Could be. The mom and pop retailers are probably one of the better places to buy toys and such because they have practically NO online presence and thus any rare or hard to get toys are basically sold in store. And you can bet any online operation they have is after hours, so if you try to sneak in an order for a million toys they will likely cancel the order in the name of fairness

      Plus, if you do patronize a mom and pop oft

  • As much as I support the intent behind this bill, government isn't the place to solve this sort of thing. Retailers could collectively choose to end this practice tomorrow if they just implemented a simple FIFO raincheck type system. You put your name on a list to buy Hard To Find Product X, and as the retailer gets stock in for Product X, they go down the list telling people to come in and pick up their item. If they don't show up after a couple days, give the next person on the list a crack at it. Rinse a

    • How would that stop resellers from stuffing their name on the list? You think retail is going to actually check IDs?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 )

        You think retail is going to actually check IDs?

        Every time I go to pick up an online order.

  • Dear "Cyber Grinches",

    The global supply chain issues has created a worldwide shortage of dog shit. Fortunately, I have a healthy supply in my back yard that I'm willing to part with for the discount price of $100 per pound. There is just one catch though. Due to the labor shortage, I don't have anyone to ship it to you. You will need to come collect it personally.

    Regards,
    Thelasko
  • The obvious solution is to convince eBay to cancel all auctions for these toys. Tell all customers that they can get a full refund. If I was in a famous band and my concert was sold out in five minutes, Iâ(TM)d do another concert the next day at the same place, and another one and another one until it starts selling out. And all the scalpers can invite their friends if they have any to watch the concerts.

    • The obvious solution is to convince eBay to cancel all auctions for these toys. Tell all customers that they can get a full refund. If I was in a famous band and my concert was sold out in five minutes, Iâ(TM)d do another concert the next day at the same place, and another one and another one until it starts selling out. And all the scalpers can invite their friends if they have any to watch the concerts.

      I was at a event where some guys were buying all the boxes of programs, to the point there were no left for fans. It was a special event so they no doubt planned to scalp them. The group printed more and sold them at face with free shipping. Someone put a bag from the event for $100k and included the url for buying a program at face in the description, the "auction" was for the plastic bag plus a handwritten note wit the url. The comments from scalpers were funny, along teh lines of "why do you hate fre

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jaa101 ( 627731 )

      If I was in a famous band and my concert was sold out in five minutes, I'd do another concert the next day at the same place, and another one and another one until it starts selling out.

      And if I were making a toy that was sold out in five minutes, I'd make more and more until demand was met, all without raising prices. Your solution and mine to these problems are equally feasible.

    • So are you saying I can't go see my favorite band two nights in a row, because I was smart enough to buy my tickets at presale?

      My wife did this one year as I only wanted to go one night and she wanted to go both nights. Guess we are depriving people of concert tickets, but they could of just jumped on presale like we did.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      If I was in a famous band and my concert was sold out in five minutes, I'd do another concert the next day at the same place, and another one and another one until it starts selling out.

      You realize most concert venues plan their calendars weeks in advance, right? You can't just come back the next day and the next when there are other acts already booked for those days.

  • Personal Responsibility is gone. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Monday November 29, 2021 @04:38PM (#62031005)

    This shit would stop dead in its tracks if people would just get a grip, realize that the world will not end if they don't get the latest shiny object before their neighbors, and let these bot running fools sit on their quickly snapped up inventory. But no, nobody can act even reasonably responsible these days. Me me me, all the time. Gee, I wonder why everything's so fucked?

    And somebody complaining about disappointing their kids by not getting them the new whatsits or the biggest whosits? Stop. You creating the whining creature and raised it to keep whining instead of teaching it that the world doesn't revolve around them. Good job.

    • I find myself both vehemently agreeing and disagreeing with your post.

      On the one hand, I very much agree that we shouldn't get our panties in a twist over inessentials. People do a lousy job at keeping things in perspective, managing priorities, and acting rationally. This isn't anything new; it just is, and I agree that people need to take more personal responsibility in how they choose to respond to those who are perceived to have wronged them. You can't always fix their behavior, but you absolutely can c

    • TFA implies that there's something inherently wrong with buying something, and later selling it at a higher price.

      No. That is by definition what every investor seeks to do.

      Reselling schemes are only profitable it the original seller underestimated the demand for the product.

      If the original seller overestimated demand for the product, the so-called "grinch" who attempts to do this is going to lose money -- and deserves to. This is a perfect example of how markets self-regulate and government intervention i

      • Buying and reselling at a higher price is called speculation. It is perfectly legal in capitalism, but illegal in communism where the government sets "fair" prices for all goods. Democratic party in the USA is slowly adopting communist messages because they sound so idealistic in theory - everyone works to the best of their ability, and everyone gets according to their needs. Too bad this is inherently incompatible with human nature (humans are not Borg) and no communist country ever prospered (before you s

    • Came to say this.

      And I actually did, a few posts below, before realizing you already said it :-)

  • Scalpers Are Good, Here's Why (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 29, 2021 @04:39PM (#62031007)

    Scalpers are actually good for efficient price discovery and a fair market :^)
    They are rewarded (profit) for bringing high-demand items to buyers at a price the market is willing to bear :^)
    If companies want to stop scalpers, they need to set their prices higher :^)

  • Until you ban high speed trading (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheNameOfNick ( 7286618 ) on Monday November 29, 2021 @04:42PM (#62031025)

    you are going to look like hypocrites. Also, people just need to not buy from scalpers. Show some restraint. If you want, want, want, you will pay, pay, pay, no matter who does the gouging.

  • I'd love to stop bots. I even wrote a bot to kill the bots one day. Within hours, the other bot writers wrote a bot to kill my bot that killed them. Are they going to outlaw me now or are we all going to jail?

    I agree that bots buying up stuff ruins my shopping experience. First world problems right? Making a law so somebody doesn't buy up all the 3080's isn't going to solve my issues. It seems to me that we have supply chain issues. If the companies making this 'stuff' can't make enough 'stuff' to s

  • Do GPU's (Score:3)

    by blackomegax ( 807080 ) on Monday November 29, 2021 @04:49PM (#62031059) Journal
    Do GPU's
  • Isn't this how all stores operate? They purchase the product from the manufacturer and then turn around and sell it to the end customer at a higher price. As long as it is an essential product (like water, food, electricity, etc.) I don't see why this should be illegal.

    If speculators want to sit on $100 million worth of PS5 consoles with the hope they can sell them for $150 million before Sony can produce more consoles, more power to 'em. But when Sony "discovers" 200,000 more consoles in their warehouse

  • The legislation .. would apply to e-commerce sites to ban bots from bypassing security measures on online retail portals.

    That sounds like something which could end up criminalizing ad blockers and other coveniences. At what point is your user agent considered a "bot?"

  • TFA implies there's something inherently wrong with buying something, and later selling it at a higher price.

    No. That is by definition what every investor seeks to do.

    Reselling schemes are only profitable it the original seller underestimated the demand for the product.

    If the original seller overestimated demand for the product, the so-called "grinch" who attempts to do this is going to lose money -- and deserves to. This is a perfect example of how markets self-regulate and government intervention is an

  • "Does everything have to be about the environment?"

    In this case, yes.

    This is consumerism gone insane - and it's been this way for many decades, but seems to ramp up a gear each passing year.
    The demand is so great, for an almost always pointless toy that will be discarded in short order, because it is whipped up by marketing.

    The vast majority of these "cool new toys" end up being what they are - overhyped pieces of junk, that just add more strain on the environment, so parents can keep on spoiling their chil

  • At the very minimum retailers can (and should) be making sure that each customer (i.e. each account) can only purchase 1 PS5 or 1 XBOX or 1 GPU or whatever. That forces the scalpers to open up more accounts.

    And there are certainly ways that retailers could improve their ability to stop scalpers from opening all these accounts (or identify the scalper accounts and shut them down)

    But the retailers don't care, they are quite happy to sell 50 PS5s to one guy and make a quick profit with little effort.

  • I know, I know, Christmas and $$$ gifts are inextricably linked. But there's no reason they have to be.

    Christmas is a religious/family enterprise 1st, and a commercial only a distant 2nd, so in theory, nothing should be lost if gifts come in January. Offer a self-made greetings card for Christmas, and buy that damned PS8 whenever chance occurs and demand is met.

    Meanwhile, let those bots buy up every stock they like. Sony should be happy to produce and sell as many as it takes to meet demand, and I hear it's

  • The real issue is (Score:3)

    by BytePusher ( 209961 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @07:07AM (#62032867) Homepage
    The real issue politicians are addressing is not that children will be sad at Christmas, but the lost revenue and habit formation from those children. Gaming consoles are often sold at a loss, with the goal of selling games and more recently subscriptions and in-game purchases. Scalpers are effectively sabotaging that revenue stream, which will never be fully recovered even if a gaming console is eventually acquired six months to a year later. Six months to a year of revenue is lost from the child's very limited childhood-span. In the longer term, the children very likely may never grow the fond attachment for PS5, Switch, etc, which further harms revenue. So, this bill wouldn't be protecting children at all, but rather protecting a business model that is currently being broken while wrapping it in but-think-of-the-children language that politicians love.

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