Been marinating in my brain...
Bags of gasoline, toilet paper, water bottles, land, houses, gold, bitcoin, dogecoin, baseball cards, pokemon toys, amiibos, sneakers, you name it.
The media will frame this as the irresponsible and ignorant hoarding of your fellow man, the unending greed of American citizens; but I also have to think of this speaks to, oft unexamined in mainstream news outlets, the desperation of regular folks. They buy bags of gasoline not just for themselves but on the off chance they make it big. They hoard toilet paper on the off chance they can sell in excess. Everything is a hustle because when you are starving, are broke, got bills up to your neck, you have to hustle.
Or am I wrong? Is it a fundamentally American thing to reach certain stratas of society and just want to greedily turn every object into a cash-cow, a golden goose egg? Once you reach an extra 30k of income, and you don't want to waste it on your dumb stupid family, you decide to gamble with it out of sheer boredom?
Who are these people really?
This connects with something I often find myself pondering whenever capitalism-defenders claim that selfishness and greed are just "human nature."
If I had to boil human nature down to one simple concept, it's self-preservation. They're right in a sense, that this drive for self-preservation manifests as selfishness and greed, but only because we live in a capitalist society that pits people against each other and encourages selfish behavior. They take this symptom of capitalism and use it as a justification. If society rewarded cooperation and punished selfish behavior, we'd see people acting very differently.
I believe this tendency to "hustle" arises out of the irrationality of our system. Even if you grow up with a comfortable amount of money, you can take all the right steps that the meritocracy-believers tell you to and still get screwed. This is especially the case in times like now when inequality is increasing and everyone except the very richest is downwardly mobile. People are incentivized to accumulate as much of a financial cushion as they can, as they can lose it at any moment. This is where the hustle comes in -- people are constantly looking for a way out, for some way to get a lot of money very quickly and not only escape precariousness for the time being, but to have enough of a cushion to never be poor again.
Lock rats in a cage and wait a week. They'll start eating each other out of desperation.
This is just their nature.
the cost of packs of cards is obscene, insane how capitalism ruins things as innocuous as children wanting pictures of their favourite athletes/pokemon
Don’t forget the inherent gambling involved in how cards are assigned a rarity level and made intentionally hard to get
Red preppers/communal prepping is a thing.
I feel like anyone involved in he Red Prepper community is also trying to maintain a certain level of self-sufficiency. Like I want to learn to garden so I can feed my family, it would make little sense to instead rely, in that case, on hoarded cans of food. The goal is to shift modes of production to small-to-self-sufficient scales, rather than just hoarding and being magnanimous in the sharing once shit hits the fan.
You're right, I have watched more doomsday preppers than I care to admit and they are probably all chuds. I don't remember even seeing a garden or greenhouse in an episode, it fits into Discovery/History channel's politics though.
I also think they forced some of the preppers change their reason for prepping (electronic grid going down, financial crash, etc), both to be different from the other episodes and probably to not let them say that Jews or minorities will cause a collapse.
Jake or Logan Paul made a video about them and now the TGC market is full of scalpers.
I have a friend that purchased a ton of Pokemon cards during the pandemic and I've been trying to get him to sell most of them to pay off his car or use on something else.
I'd be okay with them investing the money from selling the cards into stocks at this point (though I'm worried they'd use it to buy crypto), but they won't get out of the mindset that the price will keep going up forever on these damn Pokemon cards. I made the Beanie Baby comparison already, it didn't work.
I blame capitalism for this, but subreddits specifically. The constant optimism and ingroup stuff they are bombarded with on there is staggering. He is neurodivergent like me, so it is difficult to convince him of anything.
I blame capitalism for this, but subreddits specifically. The constant optimism and ingroup stuff they are bombarded with on there is staggering. He is neurodivergent like me, so it is difficult to convince him of anything.
That's another area I have been thinking about and concerned with. Mass media and communications allow every snake oil salesman to offer you a solution to your ails including financial, but add to that an almost religious zeal of "Reaching the promise land" by just holding out a little more. That you were the "true believers". Forgetting that all of these people have ulterior motives. "HOLD" they yell and meme; while they themselves are selling and dumping their stocks, their cards, their crypto.
I agree, the big posters and/or mods are definitely going to take care of themselves before telling anyone in a public website or even a Telegram channel to sell. It wouldn't surprise me if institutional investors were somehow involved too.
The funny thing is, he's aware of this. When I told them one of the new cryptos they bought $200 of was probably a scam, they were already aware of it and they (and every other member of some Discord) are waiting for other people to buy it to raise the price before they sell.
The same thing is creeping into retro games. I used to sell retro games for a living and know more or less what the supply and demand ratio is for most. The stuff going for hundreds of thousands has to be artificial inflation, no seller it their right mind would have asked for anywhere near that much, even a bidding war wouldn't get even near what some of this shit is 'going' for. That being said I wish I'd kept some of my old stock in storage until now, I could have cleaned up.
At the Target I work at our card vendor found a tracking device on her vehicle. Cool stuff
What the fuck, where they going to kidnap her over goddamn cards?! They absolutely were.
I assume it was so they would know when she was delivering to the different stores
Dunno if it's unique to america but you're onto something here.
The mercantile class that involves themselves as a middle man between a crafter and a buyer is not uniquely american or relatively new all things considered. And this doesn't necessarily fall under the smuggling categorization given all of these products are by all intents and purposes legally attainable and they are not circumventing taxes. These are hoarders, more like the Kulaks in the USSR. But also distinctly American in their libertarian ideals of making the free market work for "them" in times of extreme crisis of scarcity. But my question is if this is a desperated attempt of the lower middle class to bounce upwards off the necks and heads of those desperate to wipe their ass, or make it to work next week; or is this a distinctly "I need to protect my already dire economic situation by hoarding so I don't have to pay an arm and a leg to make it to work, or wipe my ass" — Chicken and the egg kind of sitch.
As for the scalpers, sneaker flippers, amiibo re-sellers, crypto-miners; these feel specifically on the nastier side, the "I got my money, but I want to make fuck you money". So they buy gimmicky plastic shit in the hopes of selling on ebay to an even bigger sucker.
bags of gasoline, toilet paper, water bottles, land, houses, gold, bitcoin, dogecoin, baseball cards, pokemon toys, amiibos, sneakers, you name it.
Clearly they are just preparing for an amazing party.
Also it's a cultural value to be on the look out for ways to monetise things and extract value. I believe it's called entrepreneurial
Currently, Pokémon cards (and other trading cards) are having a moment: people have swamped card grading companies, hoping to get a rating that makes their cards more valuable, and The Pokémon Company has been rushing to print enough cards to meet the demand. It seems that all the big numbers around the truly rare original cards have caused a lot of excitement around new cards as well. But Target isn’t feeling the hype.
Literally just another fucking investment scheme.
It's the NFT/stock/crypto/retro video game/comic book thing of people buying things because they see the value going up from other people buying the things. Not sure how much the pandemic is affecting this, probably a lot. Also side-hustle culture encouraging people to constantly turn their hobbies into investments.
As someone who has worked in game retail for a long time, this is insane. The old old old cards ARE valuable for a number of reasons, largely because they are 20+ years old by now. New cards are printed in MUCH larger volumes, and protective sleeves are more commonplace now than they were in the late 90s. This sort of frenzy mindset is what killed sports cards in the 90s- eventually there won't be a printing shortage, and there will be a ton of new cards on the market that people may or may not want. The old cards will be fine because you can't actually MAKE any more old cards.
The difference between PKMN and MTG vs traditional sports cards of course is utility. Baseball cards are just to look at or sell, but game cards can be used to play either for fun or competition. Magic has a more robust competitive scene, so that helps reign in some of this mentality (outside of very old cards, and the prices on those can literally be anything and it doesn't matter).
Oh, I have some old pkmn cards laying around, maybe i should look into this. Not english language ones though, which i think this bubble is based around.
