“David Flashner thought he had it wired: buy two iPhones last Friday when they first went on sale, keep one and sell the other at a profit so big it would pay for most of the first one,” Katie Hafner reports for The New York Times.
“Mr. Flashner wasted no time. He began advertising the extra phone while still in line at an Apple store in Burlingame, Calif., south of San Francisco. During his 21-hour wait, he posted half a dozen different ads to Craigslist — with prices ranging from $800 to $1,200 — and waited for the calls to come in,” Hafner reports.
“But no calls came because consumers expect that stores will soon have phones in stock. He continued to advertise the extra phone through the weekend, and ended up with just one call, which went nowhere. On Wednesday, he returned the phone,” Hafner reports.
“Mr. Flashner, 25, who manages an audio-visual equipment rental company, is not the only would-be iPhone reseller whose plan failed to follow the script,” Hafner reports.
Full article here.
Supply and demand. First the product has to be sold out (as it was yesterday – some Apple Stores have since ben restocked) and you have to have extended periods of drought (we’ll see) to build up any eBay frenzy. Nobody with a brain would buy an iPhone for some exorbitant price off eBay during the first few days when they could just walk into an Apple Store and buy one at normal retail price.