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adashofniallandasprinkleoflunacy · 3 years ago

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Coming into anthrorry's office wearing nothing but a robe while he's just sitting at his desk reading a book with his glasses on. You don't say anything, but you push all of the books to the floor and drop the robe while you walk around to the front of his desk. You sit down right in front of him, spread your legs, grab his hair, and he goes to TOWN on your p*ssy (and he also forgets to take his glasses off until after he already makes you cum the first time bc you almost broke them goodbye)

See I get that this is sexy and risky and fun but I know for a fact that if she pushed all his books to the floor, he’d have a fucking aneurysm and would fumble to grab them all because, “Y/N, I was halfway through grading that stack of papers; now they’re all mixed up! I’m gonna have to sit here and sort them back out one by one!”

“Are you serious? I’m standing here naked and you’re worried about grading papers?”

“I have 80 left and they’re due tomorrow!”

She sighs grandly, grabbing the nearest red pen— a fancy copper and gold piece with his name engraved on the side in cursive— and clicking it open. “Here, let me help, then. What’s the subject?”

Harry shoves his glasses up his nose grumpily, beginning to scoop up papers begrudgingly. “They’re first drafts for the course’s term papers. They choose a controversial topic and deconstruct it based off ethical philosophies, using peer reviewed journals as sources.”

“Oh, that’s easy. Intro stuff, basically.”

“You would think, since it’s an intro level class.” Harry quips sarcastically, glancing up at her over the rim of his glasses with a flat gaze and deadpan scowl. “But I’m pretty sure it’s academically unjust to let someone who isn’t involved in the major have any jurisdiction over grades, since they’re not versed well enough on the topics and—” His eyes suddenly snap downwards, his expression bristling with newfound panic. “Hey, don’t touch Guinevere!”

Y/N blinks at him blankly, startled by his random explosive reaction. “Who?”

“Guinevere.” Harry reaches up and snatches the elegant writing utensil she has in her grasp, waving it around symbolically before shoving it into the back pocket of his slacks protectively. He releases a measured exhale, going back to organizing papers as he explains himself in a level, matter-of-fact tone. “My favorite pen, and probably my most prized possession. It’s a hand-crafted piece my parents gifted me for my birthday last year, made with real gold. She’s very important to me, so I don’t like anyone touching her.”

“Right, okay…I can respect that.” She nods her head slowly in understanding, but purses her lips curiously as support for her next line. “I am, however, hung up on the fact that you gave a fucking pen a name and gender. Could you possibly be any more of a catastrophic nerd?”

“Don’t be so dramatic.” Harry grumbles, placing papers inside their designated manilla folders, separating them based on whether they’ve been scored yet or not. “Some people name their cars, I name my fancy custom-made pen. The difference between the two is insignificant.”

“It’s pretty significant, actually. Particularly, to my amusement.”

“Oh, well, consider me honored that I can be of entertainment to you.” He bites pettily, but the disheveled curls strewn across his forehead makes his anger look more adorable than anything. “Now are you just gonna stand there or are you gonna help clean up the mess you made?”

Y/N sighs in mild disappointment, checking that her long coat is buttoned securely before she drops to her knees beside him to lend a hand. “Not the mess I was hoping I’d have to clean up, but whatever.”

“You and I both, Bradbury.”

#anthropologyrry!ask #anthropologyrry

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realprincipalbroker · 3 years ago

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Chase her tail

You can’t tell me there’s nothing to be gleaned from it, after all.

It’s the big blue book, now. For generations, whatever a generation is, now, but generations, plural, that’s no lie, it’s the one they’ve been using in real estate license prelicensing courses in Hawaii. We all know it, and if you’re not an agent affiliated with one of the brokerage firms here, you’re probably familiar with it, and flipped through it once or twice throughout your time doing whatever it is you do here in downtown Honolulu. Even the students at University of Hawaii, have had their reasons. What can we glean, outside of the world of marketing and advertising (we are all honest about what a broker really is) they’d be teaching at a class at Shidler? It turns out, a lot, and among the many influences for Vitousek and Reilly, whose co-authorship of this book gained them their name recognition in the Hawaii real estate community dating back decades, is the history you’d find taught in a Hawaiian studies course. Terms like “Great Mahele” are instrumental to understanding the various snapshots it presents, directly, in the case of the introduction and its treatment of the history of the kingdom and land use pre-Annexation, or indirectly, by way of it’s walk through the practical day to day work of brokers to escrow agents to surveyors in what would be any ordinary day, today, getting deeds off to Bureau of Conveyances for the first buyers of the dozens of high rise condominiums that in a decade joined the skyline along Kapiolani, in Kakaako, with cranes still at work in Ward Village, and even Waikiki where Lilia begins to take shape in the Title Guaranty right around the corner from the Topa towers closest to the Waterfront, or laying the stakes around a single family home on a .16 acre lot in Makiki as escrow opens, a Hawaii custom of sorts, or as a first year agent with a newly minted RS license from PVL hung with a small brokerage house out of a commercial center in Pearl City and Waimalu and Pearlridge, right up against Pearl Harbor, like one of the several at Harbor Center, putting a Honolulu Board of Realtors’ issued Sentrilock key into a lockbox in Kaimuki and hearing those keys “drop out” that way, and just knowing what to do, on the verge of showing a four bedroom in the heart of Mililani, built in the late 70s or early 80s, as Castle & Cook led the development of the central Oahu suburbs, landscape of private property rights, and its roots in the Hawaiian kingdom. What can we glean by knowing the history and the dare I say “esoteric” knowledge of real estate brokers?

A lot, of course.

But Chapter 4 is packed with a few bonuses that as I walk the stretches of King Street and Hotel Street that Michael Corcoran reminded us was, indeed, called Shit Street, and the ramen restaurant on Fort Street Mall, Honolulu’s Times Square, oh, no, that’s the newly renovated Central Pacific Bank Building’s plaza, so Wall Street with the big bull statue, let’s go with that, and the old Piroscki shop around the corner where indeed cabbage and cheese wrapped with chicken in a delicacy that on the damp sidewalks of the pedestrian mall and the sky blue once more without a cloud in sight, you know Honolulu, takes me back to dreaming of doing business with Russia when I was a ten year old in slacks and a Bishop Street cardboard Hawaiian shirt from Costco at a time when it was definitely, undoubtedly, no match for the silk blend of what the Tori Richard catalog had already started using exclusively, the Piroscki and the steam in 69 degree weekday harbourfront morning from seeming to me to be this thing you have to make last, like something of an hourglass in a Faustus myth or else Satan’s just gonna come in and snatch up and make good on the deal, you know, well this is where I take the soul now, right? Eat the second half from the way we were with offices on Fort Street where the last manual lift still ran and the last elevator man still worked even through the early 2000s past the staples of new Bishop Street, past the “libations” of a Smith and Kings, past a Stewbum and Stonewall, around the corner and back toward Shit Street and whatever year this is, Livestock Tavern, at the end of a row of dive bars that starts down that way with Smith's Union, the one you’d sneak into when you’re a year too young, down through signs for Bar 35, with its own history, some but surely not all of it, minted in bronze, on the plaque right there at the door if you’re more into history than their signature Mexican Lollipops or Miss Chinatowns when the doors open, four hours after Aloha Tower signaled 12 o’clock with its bells. Today, this, then, must be the one. Livestock Tavern. Something about it. The end of the road. They should call it Hemlock or something. The one on the corner where it’s all over but come to think it whose to stop me from darting westbound on Hotel Street from right here and the thing with True North, as with lighthouses in the bleak way Charles Dickens saw them, at least narrating, as Pip, Great Expectations, right from the start, moral compasses, shining examples, they’re just as ugly a part of the landscape as the Prison Hulk over that way and the slime of the Thames embodied that’s got me up to breaking him free now from, who knows what, mortality itself, I guess, Livestock Tavern, the daycap on our well endowed life well lived, where for you and I, platinum hair’s a thing now, right? Remember when we were kids? They’re shuffling in now so I guess we started lunch a little late, but this “Seasonal American Eatery,” that’s what we did it all for, and here we are. There’s no winter of our lives and there’s no True North and there’s no wrong side of the block, when this is square one and the only where that life hasn’t taken us is everywhere and we still have to sneak into the bar when we’re 20, right over there, Smith's Union Bar. It doesn’t worry me that I’ve finished the Piroscki. What else is a Piroscki for? Walking, through all of it, there’s a few things from that Chapter 4, worth noting. You see, the HICENTRAL statewide MLS the agents use for listing properties rightfully structures data fields to reflect the offerings in the local markets, and we know they have a lot of leaseholds here. They list them and sell them and they’re done here unlike a lotta places in the country, in a pretty high ratio to our good old Fee Simple, right? That’s what Chapter 4 is all about.

Vitousek introduces the estate known as a Fee Tail Estate, and is extremely frank about the rationale. It’s history. Though estates and title vesting have been swayed through the last two centuries to be driven by different forces, and new definitions of what constitutes value that we live under in the 21st century, perhaps farther removed from old ideas such as this, rooted in heritability and the use of marriage and family as a means and a gauge of social control, with the attempt to reward certain mating patterns, thereby instituting purportedly “eugenic” pressures, that favor, in the example of Fee Tail Estates, landowners that do it that way, with of course the underlying assumption that the existing elites, the deserving, the well endowed, and well bred are synonymous and the Fee Tail Estate secured their multi-generational wealth, or rather, their stranglehold over the time and identities of those whose lack of title sifted them into a lower strata of existence to serve them. The Bureau of Conveyances Grantor Grantee Index is something we can analyze to better understand the prevalence of certain ideas about marriage and family. I’ve been touting what a treasure trove UH West Oahu’s Uluulu library will prove to be when it’s done archiving all of the multimedia it’s set out to. Though the popular Bishop Street publication Hawaii Business Magazine (I know they’d hate me calling it a Bishop Street publication, Steve can call me and complain personally if he wants to) in recent months seemed to echo my sentiments by taking us inside the efforts at UH West Oahu, I caught up with the librarians in mid 2021 and if you browse the available media in their catalog right now, you’ll see the archives are far from being ready for us. For, say, a sociology student with a Hawaii focus or a journalism student, the entire collection of KHON, KGMB, KHNL, KITV newscasts that Uluulu is poised to have digitized, when all is said and done is an absolute necessity to applying content analysis in the establishment a cultural milieu.

By the way, on that Uluulu deal, when they get that all done, you tell them now, we’re expecting closed captioning and transcriptriptions to make the material mineable by code as well as applying something as simple as a keyword search, and since the project began the addition of this has not only become evidently possible, through the very accurate computer speech to text generated closed captions on YouTube for the shows of a couple friends getting together to talk politics or do comedy on the weekend in a living room or talk gaming in “the basement,” but for any librarian and archivist, very easy to ask for. For a journalism student, PhD theses on the efficacy of certain styles of broadcast presentation or which newsrooms were the most ethical and produced packages of the greatest public interest, even something as the effect of station and newsroom management changes on, say, the quality of news reporting or, say, even an undergraduate research paper on the way in which one of these particular station management changes, the inside baseball, impacted or changed the editorial standards and newsworthiness for better or worse of the packages the station was airing, such a library and such an archive is an absolute necessity to that student’s making an eventual contribution to his discipline, journalism, bettering the public interests.

The problem with morality. In reality, Rich Family is someone that had a father that cared about his son's penis, that simple.

The reasons, for everything, actually, surely must’ve shifted with the social movements of generations now gone, and others we lived and breathed through, bearing witness to shattered glass and broken ceilings and new borderlines to have to cross.

To think, to wine and dine a female in one of these establishments, and how high paying sedentary work necessary to be a man in good fortune, despite these establishments and the apparent joy about those doing their mating dances on females in there speaking to a demand for what isn’t being supplied nearly enough, as evidenced by the piss soaked homeless streetwalkers and sidewalk sitters right there. And, yes, I know there are reasons and there are many. I’m talking about work as, say, a banker for Bank of Hawaii on one of the highest floors in their building that I would never say, notwithstanding architecture, real estate isn't everything when the statement that matters is the one you get in the mail, is never overshadowed by the name emblazoned on the highest building in the financial district right across the street at 999 Bishop with a degree in Economics at least from UH, the 30 floor there, is off limits to the low IQ, so-called unskilled laborers whose lot in life it was to keep their eye on the State of Hawaii Civil service job openings to see if they need a new lot of janitors that know the ins and outs of Simple Green and the cheap but sturdy enough, built to last, built to replace with ease, whatever Boeing was saying about the 737-200s, thing will decompress, oxygen masks will drop, you'll do an emergency landing right at LAX your destination out of McCarran in Las Vegas maybe a little wind coming in by then through the roof but that plane's out of service now and Boeing forever changed aviation with the 707 and this is an even bigger revolution, order a couple more of these and they'll always be there to swap out the old ones, hold up LAX for 10 minutes, they gotta bring the equipment out for you, the airport fire guys will have something to do finally in between inaugurating all these new routes the airlines are adding because of this dirty bird, she gets the job done, you'll be right in LA and on time, too, no doubt, we had to wear the masks on this one, a story to tell at the meeting downtown around 7th street this afternoon, the boys down there all know when you thumbs up them through the cockpit window, this baby's ready for the scrapyard. This mop is going into the green dumpster. What could ever go wrong with a 3M engineered plastic yellow pale for the mop with the big handle get a good hold of that with your foot. Really push that in. Now that's how your wring out a mop. Never had one of those fail on my watch yet. We got a couple new ones coming anyway. And you’ve been doing this for 20 years, even. Another walk down the corridor of the countless ones you’ve taken, the people mover isn’t really a good choice when you’ve got the mop and the pale or the cart with simple green and bleach and new rolls of toilet paper for an entire quarter of the inter-island terminal. It’s a little quieter here sometime between four and five you’ve got a few of those Hawaiian 717s pulling up to the gate and the planes are half full on days like these so they board fast and yet the leisurely pace at which it all happens, on days like these, between four and five, is nothing like the other terminal. They’re adding a whole new wing to the airport now and they’ll probably have you doing a lot there, too, so you hear. You walked around there when you got off yesterday and they’re moving fast with it. You hear somewhere that Hawaiian’s probably going to have the whole thing to free up the other concourses, and it’s amid the million images you see and sometimes forget to see, it’s your silhouette with the pale and the mop that stands between the world and those new blue 737s that are coming in now. But that’s behind us. That’s on that side. We’re here. And whole new territories to conquer, right around the corner. Two decades. I lose track of time, sometimes. Is that a long time, is that next to no time? Same yellow pale. Same industrial mop. I remember 737-200s of Aloha Airlines here in this terminal, before. Wasn’t here the day they shuttered. Glad I wasn’t. So much commotion. And I heard people cried over those airplanes. God, what for. They had them out there in storage on one of the taxiways by the cargo hangars for a long time. Such is life. I know a clean floor when I see one. There, that looks good. They’re pushing back a plane that’ll be in Lihue in half an hour and that’s about all that’s going on. Some guy’s wearing a Columbia jacket getting one of those tall white cups at the Starbucks over there and you’re working your way a little closer and he’s mixing Raw Sugar into it with a wooden stirrer, and you’re just close enough to see it, it looks like he’s got a ticket to Kona, and you know that one’s going to board all the way back there right around where you walked in. Right from Vancouver, where else, right? Seattle? The year you started working. That’s right around when he was born. So we take the mop and the pale back to the utility closet right here, right over here, just like always, and I might as well start restocking toilet paper, right? How much money did I make today? I never thought about it before. Well I’ve already made enough this week to hop one of these 717s and I’ve already made enough this month to get myself to San Francisco, or Fairbanks, you know, Main Land kind of thing. To think for once I’m the one thinking if there were anywhere in the world I could go, where would it be. The fourteen year old girls you’ve seen getting off of planes from LA or who knows where made up like Olivia Jade Gianulli or Jon Benet Ramsay, Olivia Jade Gianulli, that’s something my niece taught me at a birthday party I went to in Waimanalo around New Years. The makeup, crop top and felt neck contoured pillows, you just see it in their eyes and such a tender age for the 24k gold earrings. Somehow I know 24k when I see it. Those are the questions they ask. If anywhere in the world kinds of questions. This airport was on their list, so, oh well. I look at my face in the mirror while I spray the sink, here. The thing with time. There are four directions, north, south, east, and west. We all know that. The past. Milestones Ones in aviation history. They've got all these pictures up. I remember some of it, sure. History. Old military planes and WWII imagery and something about supersonic flight. I’ve never seen a Concorde come through here, not once, but what the hell do I know, right? History. Right here at HNL. The past. Yeah, there’s a horizon we aren’t crossing yet. Who knows if it’s a trip shorter than the one they’re on, roaring toward the heavens and slipping this place for good until she’s wheels down right over the horizon of a Makaha sunset or as long as the one to Newark. Some tickets, tickets for that one, they’re not easy to book. If there were anywhere, really, I believe it’s nowhere a compass would point me. Turn on the faucet. Looks good. I know a clean sink when I see one.

#fordreamreasons

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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As Online Shopping Surged, Amazon Planned Its New York Takeover When the pandemic gripped New York City, it propelled an enormous surge in online shopping that has not waned, even in a metropolis where stores are rarely far away. People who regularly bought online are now buying more, while those who started ordering to avoid exposure to the virus have been won over by the advantages. The abrupt shift in shopping patterns has made New York a high-stakes testing ground for urban deliveries, with its sheer density both a draw and a logistical nightmare. It has also highlighted the need for an unglamorous yet critical piece of the e-commerce infrastructure: warehouse space to store and sort packages and satisfy customer expectations for faster and faster delivery. Amazon has spent the pandemic embarking on a warehouse shopping spree in New York, significantly expanding its footprint in the biggest and most lucrative market in the country. It has snatched up at least nine new warehouses in the city, including a 1 million-plus square foot behemoth rising in Queens that will be its largest in New York, and today has at least 12 warehouses in the five boroughs. And it has added to its roster more than two dozen warehouses in suburbs surrounding the city. No other large competitor has a single warehouse in the city and Amazon has largely left most of its chief rivals, like Wal-Mart and Target, behind. “Amazon had people making deals,” said Adam Gordon, whose real estate firm Wildflower owns several warehouses in the city. “And they were outcompeting.” While New York’s narrow streets, chronic traffic jams and brutal lack of parking are all formidable challenges, the city also has a severe shortage of warehouses just when they are most needed to properly grease an efficient delivery system. New York has about 128 million square feet of industrial space, far less than many smaller cities. Indianapolis, whose population is just one-tenth that of New York’s, has nearly double the space. Chicago is the nation’s leader with more than 1.2 billion square feet. Many packages come to New York from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where there is room to build bigger and cheaper warehouses. And in the past year Amazon has added 14 new warehouses in New Jersey and on Long Island, totaling more than 7 million square feet. But having warehouses in the city is more cost effective and can trim roughly 20 percent off delivery expenses compared with deliveries that originate in New Jersey. “We are excited to continue to invest in the state of New York by adding new delivery stations,” said Deborah Bass, an Amazon spokeswoman, adding that the company’s goal was to “become part of the fabric of New York City by embracing the people, the needs, and the spirit of the community.” Amazon’s rapid expansion in New York has also drawn more scrutiny to the treatment of its workers, an issue that the company has faced in other parts of the country. Amazon has sought to quash efforts by warehouse employees to form unions — including on Staten Island — and a high-profile battle is currently being waged in Alabama. In New York, the attorney general has sued Amazon over conditions at two of its local warehouses, accusing the company of failing to properly clean its buildings and conduct adequate contact-tracing, as well as of taking “swift retaliatory action” to silence employee complaints. An Amazon spokeswoman disputed the allegations and said the company cared “deeply about the health and safety” of its workers. Amazon’s growth in New York comes two years after it abandoned plans to build a gleaming new headquarters in Queens. A chorus of lawmakers and progressive activists had opposed granting one of the world’s wealthiest companies billions of dollars in government incentives that the giant retailer had won by making cities compete against each other. But New York remains an alluring prize, and Amazon’s string of warehouses in the city puts it in a strong position to benefit from the huge spike in online shopping set off by the pandemic. Roughly 2.4 million packages are delivered in the city every day, nearly half a million more than before the pandemic, and city data shows that 80 percent of deliveries are to residential customers, compared with 40 percent before the outbreak. The torrent of e-commerce crosses all categories: daily grocery deliveries have more than doubled, restaurant and prepared food deliveries have increased by 12 percent and household goods deliveries have jumped by 24 percent, according to an analysis by José Holguín-Veras and Cara Wang, professors at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who work on transportation issues. “The challenge now is urban deliveries,” Mr. Holguín-Veras said. “And if you look at the numbers, they are only going to increase.” While there will likely be some decline in orders as the outbreak eases, the overall trajectory is clear, experts say. “The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of e-commerce by five years in one year because users have been forced to adapt,” said Marc Palazzolo, a transportation consultant for Kearny, a consulting firm that has advised the city’s business leaders on e-commerce. By 2045, the total volume of freight moving through New York City is expected to hit 540 million tons a year, up from 365 million tons today, according to city data. Still, the online shopping boom will only worsen problems like congestion and pollution that were already bad before the pandemic, sending flotillas of delivery trucks across the city and flooding sidewalks and lobbies with packages. It has come during a perilous period for New York’s small businesses, which have been battered by the pandemic with nearly 3,000 having closed for good as of last August, according to the most recent data available from the city comptroller’s office. Small businesses struggle to compete online with retailers that typically charge less for the same items and have a far more robust delivery infrastructure. “Building e-commerce capabilities isn’t easy,’’ said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the Center for an Urban Future, a research organization. “It requires a lot more than just having a website.’’ For larger retailers, having warehouses closer to consumers will become more crucial in an increasingly competitive online market. But the city, once a manufacturing center filled with factories, is not particularly welcoming. To try to protect residential neighborhoods from pollution and traffic, zoning rules limit the construction of warehouses to designated manufacturing districts. “There’s no more space to build new warehouses, so it’s leaving most retailers out of the growth,” said Gabriel Cepeda, the founder of Pickups Technologies, a storage and logistics company. Construction is underway or about to begin on new factories that will have roughly 8.7 million square feet of space in all, including a 1.2 million square-foot UPS site in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Three warehouses under construction will have multiple levels, which is common in Asia, and multiple loading docks that can be used by one company or divided among several. Amazon has signed leases at two of them. The opening of warehouses has brought some economic benefits, leading to the hiring of thousands of workers — some part-time jobs start at $17.25 an hour — at a time when many city residents are jobless. Mr. Cepeda is creating a homegrown distribution system of “mini-warehouses.” He has recruited more than 1,000 residents in Manhattan and Brooklyn who will get paid to use their apartments to store goods for retailers and send them out for delivery. Amazon, which owns Whole Foods, has also used the grocery stores to fulfill online orders, with its workers often outnumbering store customers. Walmart had a warehouse in the Bronx through Jet.com, a now-defunct shopping site it owned, but later vacated the property, which is now leased by Amazon. Wal-Mart — which has no stores in the city — uses warehouses in Pennsylvania to serve online customers. Target, which started same-day delivery in the city in 2017 and has about two dozen stores in New York, has used its stores as mini-distribution hubs, in part because it is cheaper to fulfill an online order in a store than at an out-of-town warehouse. Many smaller companies are feeling the pressure to expand their online and delivery operations. Stop & Shop has hired hundreds of workers to increase its online grocery service in the New York area, including at a warehouse in nearby Jersey City. Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors, the butcher for many high-end restaurants, has spent more than $1 million on its online and retail sales operations, selling to shoppers on its website and through Amazon Fresh and ShopRite. That business made up as much as 90 percent of the company’s sales in 2020, up from 15 percent before the pandemic. “Home delivery will be prominent for the next decade,” Mr. LaFrieda said. “It will be key to our success.” The company has reconfigured its New Jersey warehouse to prioritize retail sales and designed new packaging for online customers. While Amazon is laying the foundation for online dominance in New York, Mr. Gordon, the owner of several warehouses, said other retailers would also need to become more nimble to respond to the new ways people are buying. The e-commerce demands also place added pressure on warehouse workers and drivers to fulfill and deliver orders on time, as customers now expect. “Just-in-time delivery and last-mile delivery is what it means,’’ Mr. Gordon said. “You need to be very close to your customer to provide the level of service that people now expect.” Source link Orbem News #Amazon #Online #planned #Shopping #surged #takeover #York

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xtruss · 5 years ago

Text

He Has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them!

Amazon cracked down on Coronavirus price gouging. Now, while the rest of the World searches, some sellers are holding stockpiles of sanitizer and masks.

— By Jack Nicas | March 12, 2020 | The New York Times

On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States was announced, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn., they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home Depot. At each store, they cleaned out the shelves.

Over the next three days, Noah Colvin took a 1,300-mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U-Haul truck with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes, mostly from “little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods,” his brother said. “The major metro areas were cleaned out.”

Matt Colvin stayed home near Chattanooga, preparing for pallets of even more wipes and sanitizer he had ordered, and starting to list them on Amazon. Mr. Colvin said he had posted 300 bottles of hand sanitizer and immediately sold them all for between $8 and $70 each, multiples higher than what he had bought them for. To him, “it was crazy money.” To many others, it was profiteering from a pandemic.

The next day, Amazon pulled his items and thousands of other listings for sanitizer, wipes and face masks. The company suspended some of the sellers behind the listings and warned many others that if they kept running up prices, they’d lose their accounts. EBay soon followed with even stricter measures, prohibiting any U.S. sales of masks or sanitizer.

Now, while millions of people across the country search in vain for hand sanitizer to protect themselves from the spread of the coronavirus, Mr. Colvin is sitting on 17,700 bottles of the stuff with little idea where to sell them.

“It’s been a huge amount of whiplash,” he said. “From being in a situation where what I’ve got coming and going could potentially put my family in a really good place financially to ‘What the heck am I going to do with all of this?’”

Mr. Colvin is one of probably thousands of sellers who have amassed stockpiles of hand sanitizer and crucial respirator masks that many hospitals are now rationing, according to interviews with eight Amazon sellers and posts in private Facebook and Telegram groups from dozens more. Amazon said it had recently removed hundreds of thousands of listings and suspended thousands of sellers’ accounts for price gouging related to the coronavirus.

Amazon, eBay, Walmart and other online-commerce platforms are trying to stop their sellers from making excessive profits from a public health crisis. While the companies aimed to discourage people from hoarding such products and jacking up their prices, many sellers had already cleared out their local stores and started selling the goods online.

Now both the physical and digital shelves are nearly empty.

Mikeala Kozlowski, a nurse in Dudley, Mass., has been searching for hand sanitizer since before she gave birth to her first child, Nora, on March 5. When she searched stores, which were sold out, she skipped getting gas to avoid handling the pump. And when she checked Amazon, she couldn’t find it for less than $50.

“You’re being selfish, hoarding resources for your own personal gain,” she said of the sellers.

Sites like Amazon and eBay have given rise to a growing industry of independent sellers who snatch up discounted or hard-to-find items in stores to post online and sell around the world.

These sellers call it retail arbitrage, a 21st-century career that has adults buying up everything from limited-run cereals to Fingerling Monkeys, a once hot toy. The bargain hunters look for anything they can sell at a sharp markup. In recent weeks, they found perhaps their biggest opportunity: a pandemic.

As they watched the list of Amazon’s most popular searches crowd with terms like “Purell,” “N95 mask” and “Clorox wipes,” sellers said, they did what they had learned to do: Suck up supply and sell it for what the market would bear.

Initially, the strategy worked. For several weeks, prices soared for some of the top results to searches for sanitizer, masks and wipes on Amazon, according to a New York Times analysis of historical prices from Jungle Scout, which tracks data for Amazon sellers. The data shows that both Amazon and third-party sellers like Mr. Colvin increased their prices, which then mostly dropped when Amazon took action against price gouging this month.

At the high prices, people still bought the products en masse, and Amazon took a cut of roughly 15 percent and eBay roughly 10 percent, depending on the price and the seller.

Then the companies, pressured by growing criticism from regulators and customers, cracked down. After the measures last week, Amazon went further on Wednesday, restricting sales of any coronavirus-related products from certain sellers.

“Price gouging is a clear violation of our policies, unethical, and in some areas, illegal,” Amazon said in a statement. “In addition to terminating these third party accounts, we welcome the opportunity to work directly with states attorneys general to prosecute bad actors.”

Mr. Colvin, 36, a former Air Force technical sergeant, said he started selling on Amazon in 2015, developing it into a six-figure career by selling Nike shoes and pet toys, and by following trends.

In early February, as headlines announced the coronavirus’s spread in China, Mr. Colvin spotted a chance to capitalize. A nearby liquidation firm was selling 2,000 “pandemic packs,” leftovers from a defunct company. Each came with 50 face masks, four small bottles of hand sanitizer and a thermometer. The price was $5 a pack. Mr. Colvin haggled it to $3.50 and bought them all.

Hand sanitizer that Mr. Colvin is keeping in a storage locker. Credit: Doug Strickland for The New York Times

He quickly sold all 2,000 of the 50-packs of masks on eBay, pricing them from $40 to $50 each, and sometimes higher. He declined to disclose his profit on the record but said it was substantial.

The success stoked his appetite. When he saw the panicked public starting to pounce on sanitizer and wipes, he and his brother set out to stock up.

Elsewhere in the country, other Amazon sellers were doing the same.

Chris Anderson, an Amazon seller in central Pennsylvania, said he and a friend had driven around Ohio, buying about 10,000 masks from stores. He used coupons to buy packs of 10 for around $15 each and resold them for $40 to $50. After Amazon’s cut and other costs, he estimates, he made a $25,000 profit.

Mr. Anderson is now holding 500 packs of antibacterial wipes after Amazon blocked him from selling them for $19 each, up from $16 weeks earlier. He bought the packs for $3 each.

Eric, a truck driver from Ohio who spoke on the condition that his surname not be published because he feared Amazon would retaliate, said he had also collected about 10,000 masks at stores. He bought each 10-pack for about $20 and sold most for roughly $80 each, though some he priced at $125.

“Even at $125 a box, they were selling almost instantly,” he said. “It was mind-blowing as far as what you could charge.” He estimates he made $35,000 to $40,000 in profit.

Now he has 1,000 more masks on order, but he’s not sure what to do with them. He said Amazon had been vague about what constituted price gouging, scaring away sellers who don’t want to risk losing their ability to sell on its site.

To regulators and many others, the sellers are sitting on a stockpile of medical supplies during a pandemic. The attorney general’s offices in California, Washington and New York are all investigating price gouging related to the coronavirus. California’s price-gouging law bars sellers from increasing prices by more than 10 percent after officials declare an emergency. New York’s law prohibits sellers from charging an “unconscionably excessive price” during emergencies.

An official at the Washington attorney general’s office said the agency believed it could apply the state’s consumer-protection law to sue platforms or sellers, even if they aren’t in Washington, as long as they were trying to sell to Washington residents.

Noah Colvin, Mr. Colvin’s brother, moving boxes of hand sanitizer from his brother’s storage locker on Thursday. Credit: Doug Strickland for The New York Times

Mr. Colvin does not believe he was price gouging. While he charged $20 on Amazon for two bottles of Purell that retail for $1 each, he said people forget that his price includes his labor, Amazon’s fees and about $10 in shipping. (Alcohol-based sanitizer is pricey to ship because officials consider it a hazardous material.)

Current price-gouging laws “are not built for today’s day and age,” Mr. Colvin said. “They’re built for Billy Bob’s gas station doubling the amount he charges for gas during a hurricane.”

He added, “Just because it cost me $2 in the store doesn’t mean it’s not going to cost me $16 to get it to your door.”

But what about the morality of hoarding products that can prevent the spread of the virus, just to turn a profit?

Mr. Colvin said he was simply fixing “inefficiencies in the marketplace.” Some areas of the country need these products more than others, and he’s helping send the supply toward the demand.

“There’s a crushing overwhelming demand in certain cities right now,” he said. “The Dollar General in the middle of nowhere outside of Lexington, Ky., doesn’t have that.”

He thought about it more. “I honestly feel like it’s a public service,” he added. “I’m being paid for my public service.”

As for his stockpile, Mr. Colvin said he would now probably try to sell it locally. “If I can make a slight profit, that’s fine,” he said. “But I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me.”

After The Times published this article on Saturday morning, Mr. Colvin said he was exploring ways to donate all the supplies.

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itsfinancethings · 4 years ago

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New story in Business from Time: How Travelers Are Beating Tough Flight Restrictions Eight Month Into the Pandemic

Travel curbs and border restrictions are upending lives around the globe, with some people resorting to chartering planes on their own or paying many times the regular ticket price to get back to their jobs and homes.

Eight months into the pandemic, the push to normalize is seeing some try to travel internationally again, whether for a long-delayed but essential business trip or to return to where they live. Yet with global coronavirus cases surpassing 18 million and rising, airlines are only reluctantly adding flights to their bare-bones schedules, and virus resurgences have some countries imposing new travel rules.

The flight paralysis underscores how deep and lasting the pandemic’s damage is proving to be. The number of international flights to the U.S., Australia and Japan has fallen more than 80% from a year ago, while flights to China are down by more than 94%, according to aviation industry database Cirium.

Travelers have to be creative just to get on a plane. Support groups have sprung up on Facebook and Wechat for those who have been stuck thousands of miles from their jobs, homes and families. Unable to get tickets, some are attempting to organize private chartered flights, while travel agents say they’re having to bribe airlines for limited seats. Others are shelling out for business or first-class tickets, only to be turned away for lack of the right documentation.

“So many people with families are separated, it’s so heart-breaking,” said Ariel Lee, a mother in Shanghai who administers a few Wechat groups of 1,650 members in total trying to get into China. “The toughest part is there are no clear guidelines and there’s no end date to this.”

The hopeful talk of travel corridors and a summer recovery have faded away among airline industry experts, replaced by a consensus that global travel will not effectively re-start before a vaccine is found.

“We are not going to see a material recovery for international travel in the near future,” said Steven Kwok, associate partner of OC&C Strategy Consultants Ltd. “The pandemic also brings about a consequential impact beyond the virus outbreak –- it is causing a slowdown in the global economy, which will hurt travel appetite for a longer term.”

Higher prices

Chris Wells had been stuck in his hometown in Texas for half a year, eagerly looking to return to Guangzhou, a city in southern China where he’s been living and working for more than a decade. International travel to China has been severely limited by the government to stem imported infections, and any seats on flights are snatched up almost instantly.

Wells, 41, a manager in an international sourcing company, searched and searched for a ticket. The only one he could find: an $8,800 one-way, first-class flight from Chicago to Shanghai, via Zurich.

“It was the only seat available,” he said. “I’d normally never pay that much for a ticket, but I was desperate to get back so I grabbed the seat when I found it.”

Cherry Lin, a Shanghai-based travel agent, said her company is having to pay kickbacks to airlines — more than 10,000 yuan ($1,438) per seat — to get tickets on popular routes like those departing from the U.S. and U.K. that they can then sell to customers.

The flight or passenger cap set by many countries largely limits seats, pushing fares up — a ticket for a direct flight from London to Shanghai is currently going for about $5,000, said Lin, but those are quickly purchased.

Additional seats are likely to pop up this month as more airlines resume flights, “but still not enough that everyone can easily buy online,” she said.

Changing rules

Jessica Cutrera, 44, an American who has lived in Hong Kong for more than a decade, was looking to return to the Asian financial center last month when the city suddenly required a negative virus test for passengers coming from high-risk countries including the U.S. She had to show results from a test taken within 72 hours before boarding and fulfill a requirement that travelers present a letter — signed by a government official — verifying that the lab is accredited.

Getting test results within 72 hours was hard enough given that testing is so backed up in the U.S that results usually aren’t available before a week. Then there was the required letter. “I called everybody I could find,” she said. “Most offices and agencies said no, it didn’t make sense to them to sign such a letter.”

Eventually, someone in California agreed to sign. So Cutrera flew from Louisville, Kentucky, to Chicago, and then to Los Angeles, where she had the test done. A few days later, she was allowed to board her flight to Hong Kong, while others trying to get on the same plane were turned away as they didn’t have the proper paperwork.

Cutrera is proving to be one of the lucky ones, as many continue to be in limbo.

Lucy Parakhina, a 33-year-old Australian photographer, had decided to stay in London, where she has lived for two years.

But in June, she started to plan a return trip when her U.K. work visa expired. Though she managed to buy a one-way ticket from London to Sydney for less than 700 pounds ($922) with Qatar Airways, she was bumped from her flight and told it was postponed.

She already left her job in London and gave up her apartment, and won’t have income to stay in the U.K. beyond September. But with a virus resurgence in Australia showing no signs of ebbing and international flights down by 92% to the country, she’s likely stuck for a while.

“Now the only thing I can do is to wait for the easing policies and my flight to depart as planned,” she said.

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teeky185 · 5 years ago

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On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver SUV to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tennessee, they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home Depot. At each store, they cleaned out the shelves.Over the next three days, Noah Colvin took a 1,300-mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U-Haul truck with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes, mostly from "little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods," his brother said. "The major metro areas were cleaned out."Matt Colvin stayed home near Chattanooga, preparing for pallets of even more wipes and sanitizer he had ordered, and starting to list them on Amazon. Colvin said he had posted 300 bottles of hand sanitizer and immediately sold them all for between $8 and $70 each, multiples higher than what he had bought them for. To him, "it was crazy money." To many others, it was profiteering from a pandemic.The next day, Amazon pulled his items and thousands of other listings for sanitizer, wipes and face masks. The company suspended some of the sellers behind the listings and warned many others that if they kept running up prices, they'd lose their accounts. EBay soon followed with even stricter measures, prohibiting any U.S. sales of masks or sanitizer.Now, while millions of people search in vain for hand sanitizer to protect themselves from the spread of the coronavirus, Colvin is sitting on 17,700 bottles of the stuff with little idea where to sell them."It's been a huge amount of whiplash," he said. "From being in a situation where what I've got coming and going could potentially put my family in a really good place financially to 'What the heck am I going to do with all of this?'"Colvin is one of probably thousands of sellers who have amassed stockpiles of hand sanitizer and crucial respirator masks that many hospitals are now rationing, according to interviews with eight Amazon sellers and posts in private Facebook and Telegram groups from dozens more. Amazon said it had recently removed hundreds of thousands of listings and suspended thousands of sellers' accounts for price gouging related to the coronavirus.Amazon, eBay, Walmart and other online-commerce platforms are trying to stop their sellers from making excessive profits from a public health crisis. While the companies aimed to discourage people from hoarding such products and jacking up their prices, many sellers had already cleared out their local stores and started selling the goods online.Now both the physical and digital shelves are nearly empty.Mikeala Kozlowski, a nurse in Dudley, Massachusetts, has been searching for hand sanitizer since before she gave birth to her first child, Nora, on March 5. When she searched stores, which were sold out, she skipped getting gas to avoid handling the pump. And when she checked Amazon, she couldn't find it for less than $50."You're being selfish, hoarding resources for your own personal gain," she said of the sellers.Sites like Amazon and eBay have given rise to a growing industry of independent sellers who snatch up discounted or hard-to-find items in stores to post online and sell around the world.These sellers call it retail arbitrage, a 21st-century career that has adults buying up everything from limited-run cereals to Fingerling Monkeys, a once hot toy. The bargain hunters look for anything they can sell at a sharp markup. In recent weeks, they found perhaps their biggest opportunity: a pandemic.As they watched the list of Amazon's most popular searches crowd with terms like "Purell," "N95 mask" and "Clorox wipes," sellers said, they did what they had learned to do: Suck up supply and sell it for what the market would bear.Initially, the strategy worked. For several weeks, prices soared for some of the top results to searches for sanitizer, masks and wipes on Amazon, according to a New York Times analysis of historical prices from Jungle Scout, which tracks data for Amazon sellers. The data shows that both Amazon and third-party sellers like Colvin increased their prices, which then mostly dropped when Amazon took action against price gouging this month.At the high prices, people still bought the products en masse, and Amazon took a cut of roughly 15% and eBay roughly 10%, depending on the price and the seller.Then the companies, pressured by growing criticism from regulators and customers, cracked down. After the measures last week, Amazon went further Wednesday, restricting sales of any coronavirus-related products from certain sellers."Price gouging is a clear violation of our policies, unethical, and in some areas, illegal," Amazon said in a statement. "In addition to terminating these third party accounts, we welcome the opportunity to work directly with states attorneys general to prosecute bad actors."Colvin, 36, a former Air Force technical sergeant, said he started selling on Amazon in 2015, developing it into a six-figure career by selling Nike shoes and pet toys, and by following trends.In early February, as headlines announced the coronavirus' spread in China, Colvin spotted a chance to capitalize. A nearby liquidation firm was selling 2,000 "pandemic packs," leftovers from a defunct company. Each came with 50 face masks, four small bottles of hand sanitizer and a thermometer. The price was $5 a pack. Colvin haggled it to $3.50 and bought them all.He quickly sold all 2,000 of the 50-packs of masks on eBay, pricing them from $40 to $50 each, and sometimes higher. He declined to disclose his profit on the record but said it was substantial.The success stoked his appetite. When he saw the panicked public starting to pounce on sanitizer and wipes, he and his brother set out to stock up.Elsewhere, other Amazon sellers were doing the same.Chris Anderson, an Amazon seller in central Pennsylvania, said he and a friend had driven around Ohio, buying about 10,000 masks from stores. He used coupons to buy packs of 10 for around $15 each and resold them for $40 to $50. After Amazon's cut and other costs, he estimates, he made a $25,000 profit.Anderson is now holding 500 packs of antibacterial wipes after Amazon blocked him from selling them for $19 each, up from $16 weeks earlier. He bought the packs for $3 each.Eric, a truck driver from Ohio who spoke on condition that his surname not be published because he feared Amazon would retaliate, said he had also collected about 10,000 masks at stores. He bought each 10-pack for about $20 and sold most for roughly $80 each, although some he priced at $125."Even at $125 a box, they were selling almost instantly," he said. "It was mind-blowing as far as what you could charge."He estimates he made $35,000 to $40,000 in profit.Now he has 1,000 more masks on order, but he's not sure what to do with them. He said Amazon had been vague about what constituted price gouging, scaring away sellers who don't want to risk losing their ability to sell on its site.To regulators and many others, the sellers are sitting on a stockpile of medical supplies during a pandemic. The attorney general's offices in California, Washington and New York are all investigating price gouging related to the coronavirus. California's price-gouging law bars sellers from increasing prices by more than 10 percent after officials declare an emergency. New York's law prohibits sellers from charging an "unconscionably excessive price" during emergencies.An official at the Washington attorney general's office said the agency believed it could apply the state's consumer-protection law to sue platforms or sellers, even if they aren't in Washington, as long as they were trying to sell to Washington residents.Colvin does not believe he was price gouging. While he charged $20 on Amazon for two bottles of Purell that retail for $1 each, he said people forget that his price includes his labor, Amazon's fees and about $10 in shipping. (Alcohol-based sanitizer is pricey to ship because officials consider it a hazardous material.)Current price-gouging laws "are not built for today's day and age," Colvin said. "They're built for Billy Bob's gas station doubling the amount he charges for gas during a hurricane."He added, "Just because it cost me $2 in the store doesn't mean it's not going to cost me $16 to get it to your door."But what about the morality of hoarding products that can prevent the spread of the virus, just to turn a profit?Colvin said he was simply fixing "inefficiencies in the marketplace." Some areas of the country need these products more than others, and he's helping send the supply toward the demand."There's a crushing overwhelming demand in certain cities right now," he said. "The Dollar General in the middle of nowhere outside of Lexington, Kentucky, doesn't have that."He thought about it more."I honestly feel like it's a public service," he added. "I'm being paid for my public service."As for his stockpile, Colvin said he would now probably try to sell it locally."If I can make a slight profit, that's fine," he said. "But I'm not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I'm selling for 20 times what they cost me."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

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deniscollins · 5 years ago

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He Has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them

During a pandemic, would you drive 1,300 miles over three days to fill a U-Haul truck with thousands of hand sanitizers and then sell them to the highest bidders on EBay and high prices on Amazon.com: (1) Yes, (2) No? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

If after having done so, what would you do if after a few days Amazon and EBay banned you from doing so because you were profitting from a health crisis and you still have 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizers: (1) find other ways to sell them, (2) be content with your monopoly profits to date and donate them, (3) something else, if so what? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Now both the physical and digital shelves are nearly empty.

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