Comments on: Luxury sneaker markets are a preview of Capitalist Dystopia

By: Lucklucky

Lucklucky — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 21:08:26 +0000

What’s the difference for stamp collecting or art dealing?

By: Mike in Boston

Mike in Boston — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 16:28:23 +0000

“No one needs a house in a nice neighborhood” After your third or fourth break-in in a not-so-nice neighborhood, you might see things differently. As Steve Sailer put it back in 2009: “The chief problem with being poor in 21st Century America is not that you can’t afford to buy enough stuff, it’s that you can’t afford to move away from other poor people.”

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 17:01:08 +0000

“It’s not capitalist dystopia so much as capitalist utopia: what happens when people have so much access to leverage that they’ll invest it in status games. No one needs a house in a nice neighborhood, or is going to starve to death because they were forced to buy medical insurance instead of bread.”

Exactly.

By: Bomag

Bomag — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 03:18:21 +0000

“The global sneaker resale market is valued at $2 billion and expected to triple in the next few years, reaching $30 billion by the end of the decade.”

Wasn’t this said about Iridium satellite phones?

By: Rabid Digital

Rabid Digital — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 02:08:15 +0000

Happy New Years!

By: A Wild Goose

A Wild Goose — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 21:47:53 +0000

$30 billion market in a decade? The developed world economies will collapse well before then.

By: Gwern

Gwern — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 18:22:52 +0000

The problems with the ‘luxury sneaker market’ stem primarily from it not being a *market*; if it was, ‘bots’ would be irrelevant. Sneakers would be sold at the price that clears the market, using an auction if necessary, and ‘sniping’ would be irrelevant. No scalper is going to buy at the auction to then pay shipping and overhead to resell it to a later buyer at a lower price. They all could be wiped out in an instant if the original sellers in question ever wanted to bother. It’s not like it’s some great mystery. ‘My goodness! Some scalpers sniped the new GPUs – again! No one could have foreseen this.’

Just like with Ticketmaster or GPUs, the stable long-term existence of scalpers is solely because they don’t dare sell at the actual price, and rely on non-price mechanisms. Why is that?

Because the psychology of luxury sneaker collectors is anti-market – if Supreme sold its swag at the market price, that wouldn’t be *cool*. And if it wasn’t *cool* you couldn’t lord it over your peers or show off your collection.

It’s not capitalist dystopia so much as capitalist utopia: what happens when people have so much surplus money they’ll pour it into status games. No one needs a luxury sneaker, or is going to starve to death because they were forced to buy an Air Jordan instead of bread.

It’s silly when you look at it from the outside, but people find it of value, and so even the bot operators and YouTube hustlers and ‘exchanges’ are providing a useful service by fixing the markets that the luxury brands are intrinsically unable to be seen to fix lest it dirty and pollute their cool by trafficking with mere grubby commerce. (See for example the Ticketmaster scandal where the pure ethereal artists got a cut of the tickets sold at the actual prices while Ticketmaster – that evil faceless soulless corporation! – took the blame, thereby preserving the artists’ reputation for being about art, not ‘screwing over their fans’.)