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?
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.