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 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.