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xtruss · 5 years ago

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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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chiefbeck · 4 years ago

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Chapter 18: Harley and Me A basket case...

I was born in 1966; I know a lady never mentions her age, but I never got a rule book, and to tell the truth, I don’t follow most of those antiquated sexist rules anyway. I believe we can all do what we need and what we want across gender barriers; it just isn’t that big a deal. Most of those silly rules are there to keep women in their place anyway. Face it, most women are not Barbie, and women do get a year older every year. We just age well I guess, kind of like wine.

So on with the story, I was born in 1966 and a friend of mine builds Harley Davidson motorcycles as a hobby. He is a technical genius and retired from the Navy and is now a firefighter. God knows why he went into saving more lives after 20 years of combat in the Navy, but that is what he’s up to. He builds these awesome motorcycles for fun.

In his garage spread around in half a dozen milk crates and baskets was a 1966 Harley engine. A basket case. Now this is a special engine; it was the year of my birth, and it was also the first year Harley made a shovel head engine. I had an old 1960 Harley, which is still in the family, but a 1966 bumps me up into a more reliable engine with the newly designed head and cam design. The problem is this was a Panhead lower and shovel upper. If you don’t know what I am talking about with all this “Harley head” stuff, look up those couple of things.... it’s kind of cool.

So the problem, it was mixed up, but that was also a really cool part ‘cause this engine number’s in the few thousands and is kind of rare. Other problem was it was all torn apart and all over his garage. There were broken and worn out parts mixed with a few Honda parts, dang. Oh yeah, a mouse was living in one of the jugs. Oh, yeah, the jug is a cylinder; that’s the part that holds the piston and the pressure from the explosions.

I begged him for the engine. He said no, he had an idea for a bike.

I deployed to Afghanistan and got back a half a year later.

I begged him for the engine, even pointing out that the mouse had kids, and I needed that engine for my project bike. It was my dream bike; one that was born the same year as me. It needed a bunch of work; it was a torn up and old broken barely anything left...kind of like me.

He said no.

Months go by and I see him at work down there in Dam Neck Navy base, and we go to some bars, and the engine is never brought up. A few months go by, and I am getting ready to go back to Afghanistan, and he sees me at the bar. “Hey Chris, you want that engine?” “Hell Yeah!” “Two Thousand and it’s yours.”

I am the proud new owner of 7 baskets of parts. I haul them to my garage in Virginia Beach. He gets to keep the mouse.

I deploy to Afghanistan. In my will that we all write up before we deploy, I leave this pile of parts and my 1960 Harley to him. He is one of my best friends and still is by the way.

When I get back from the war, I take 4 weeks off. I am going to build me a motor-sickle. I spread all the parts out on my work bench and start cleaning stuff up and measuring them out to see if they are in specifications to re-use. Three days later I have a list of parts that I need to buy to complete the engine. I start making up another list of parts to actually build the bike.

My favorite builders are “Zero Choppers.” So I build a combat style zero chopper. I get a sweet rigid gooseneck frame and some pretty big rims and tires. This is going to look a little like a Mad Max meets WWII combat motorcycle with barely any chrome or flashy junk. “Chrome don’t get you home; flash is trash.”

I start building the engine, and in a few weeks, I have a complete engine. Ported and polished out the intake and exhaust and cut some of the engine off to “customize” it. I used tractor hydraulic hoses for all the oil lines. The engine looked real cool. Hope it runs.

I get the frame, fenders and bars and all kinds of stuff sent in the mail. Luckily I have my own MIG welder at the house like any girl would, duh. And I am a welding, cutting and chopping. I am in heaven.

I go out on some more work out of the country and am gone a lot during these years. So I work like a madwoman on the motorcycle, then I am gone for a while. The project is going on near two years, dang war.

I have a buddy that owns a shop a few miles from my house, so I get back from one of my trips and ask him if I could bring the bike over to finish it out. He says yes, just keep the beer fridge full. Cool.

I load the bike up; its three quarters done. Fine tuning and then a once over to make sure I didn’t jack anything up. The shop is a story to itself. We work hard, but then start drinking beer and moonshine every afternoon, and then, the chainsaw comes out or we start welding some crazy shit. Once in a while we pull the guns out and start doing real stupid stuff. You got to love Virginia; there is no other place like it.

I get parts from all over the place. I use an old thrown away oxygen tank that was used for thermo baric cutting torches as an oil tank and old surplus weapons parts all over the bike. NO parts were added to the bike that didn’t need to be there to make it run. This is not a bozo bike like Orange County with stuff just pasted on to make it look good.

I minimized Chrome and for some things that only come in chrome I sand blasted the parts to dull them out. For paint, I used rattle can olive drab for the tanks and fenders. Frame was black. A lot of black parts, like the foot pegs and controls, needed to be powder coated to make them last. I couldn’t afford the powdered coating at the time, so I did it myself. Sprayed the powder on and used the kitchen oven to bake them at 250 degrees for half an hour. It worked great, but made the kitchen smell real bad. The oven won’t be baking any cookies ever again unless they use some of that easy off or some engine cleaner or something. Oh well.

A few weeks into our drunken monkey wrenching, the bike is rolling, and we got the engine and all the pertinence hooked up. Time to kick it. YES, kick it.

You see there are t-shirts that say “ole skool biker,” but that type of person is rare now-a-days. A Harley of this era didn’t have no electric start. As a matter of fact, the bike I built didn’t even have a battery. This was truly an ole skool bike.

We added about a gallon of gas to the tank, let the carburetor fill up and then I started giving it some prime kicks to get the gas in the cylinders and move some oil a bit.

Then, I retarded the magneto, so the spark would be late. Yes, you want it retarded a bit, which is a late spark, so when it fires off, the engine it doesn’t catch the kick peddle and break your leg. It does happen.

Ignition on, primed, spark late.... I kick with all my might. Nothing. I kick again. Nothing. Ok to keep this from going on tooooooo long. I am kicking for ten minutes, one of the guys says let me try. No way. I kick another five minutes and fall off the bike onto the ground, freaking beat me. Dang it. We go over the whole bike and find a short, dang. Well off to the races.

I start kicking and five minutes later it coughs. I am jumping up and down like crazy. It coughed. We are drinking beers and toasting.

My legs are spaghetti so I am was surprised that it even did that. I look over my beer and ask if anyone else wanted to try a kick. Bear, yes his nickname is Bear and he is a big dude. One of his legs is the weight of my whole body. He can bench press five hundred and still runs like a gazelle, SEAL Team shit....don’t ask where these dudes come from.

He steps over the bike and cranks the throttle a couple times to prime it. Gives it a kick and ...rumble, rumble. It was like ten seconds of coughing. That was awesome. It looked like he was only half kicking it. Then he gives it anther kick and bam, it roars to life.

We are all cheering. Toasting and hooting and hollering.

It is the loudest bike ever made. The rear pipe is a cut up Russian Rocket Propelled Grenade Launcher (RPG-7), and it is tuned to the loudest most obnoxious Harley ever built.

It was so cool and the coolest bike to ride. I rode it from Tampa to Daytona for bike week. Rigid frame wasn’t so nice, but I did it. I entered it into the “Willie’s Old School Chopper Show.” It came in first place for shovel heads. It was awesome. They took a photo of me with the trophy and a couple of girls who were models in the magazines.

I ended up in Easy Rider Magazine for that bike.

It was a cool bike; it started out as a broken up pile of junk with a mouse living in it. Really messed up. It reminds me of me. i was messed up and broken from the many injuries that I have survived. I am barely

holding it together in my mental and physical sense. How am I even still here? I am in the basket under a work bench in a dusty garage. I had a boost when I came out to live a new life. That boost started me working on myself. Dang in the old days I took a shower when I really needed it. Didn’t shave and barely brushed my teeth. I didn’t care; I was almost dead and didn’t need this body much longer. I didn’t care what anyone thought, pain didn’t care.

Living a new life, turning a new leaf. I use products in my hair now. I brush my teeth in the morning and at night before bed; even use some whitener. I use moisturizers now and take care of myself; kind of like re-welding the parts back in place and shining up the rough spots.

I think everyone needs this once in a while. We all need someone even if it’s ourselves to clean up and rebuild. Stop waiting and do it; color your hair or get your teeth whitened; every bit counts, and sometimes that little start will lead you to bigger and better experiences and challenges. With these great challenges comes great reward; trust me.

I am glad that I was able to do this with an old 1966 Harley and this old 1966 chick.

#harley davidson #Kristin Beck

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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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