An Amazon Merchant, Matt Colvin, along with his brother, Noah Colvin of Tennessee set out to bleed the hand sanitizer market dry — only to be barred from selling them on Amazon.
The first death from the novel coronavirus happened on on February 29th in Washington state — the next day Matt and Noah Colvin embarked on their journey of price-gouging. The brothers drove around their home town of Chattanooga, Tennessee in an SUV and cleaned out entire shelves of their supplies. They reportedly cleared out shelves in Dollar Tree, Walmart, Staples, and Home Depot.
Then, for three days after this initial buy-out, Noah Colvin traveled 1,300 miles around Tennessee and into Kentucky in a U-Haul truck, filling it with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and anti-bacterial wipes.
In a New York Times interview, Matt Colvin reports that his brother mostly bought from “little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods,” as “the major metro areas were cleaned out” he describes.
As his brother was buying more supplies, Matt Colvin stayed home and prepared pallets of more wipes and sanitizer, where he then listed them on Amazon. He posted 300 bottles of hand sanitizer for sale, which sold out almost immediately for anywhere between $8 and $70 each. Hand sanitizer typically retails for $1. Colvin described it as “crazy money.”
His “crazy money” ended the next day however when Amazon pulled his listings, along with thousands like it that were profiting from hand sanitizer, disinfecting wipes, and face masks.
Attempting to make himself the victim, Matt Colvin told NY Times this; “It’s been a huge amount of whiplash. 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?’”
Well, well, well, if this isn’t the consequences of your own actions?
Matt Colvin reportedly donated 2/3 of his stock pile to a church to avoid investigations by the Tennessee Attorney General for price gouging, only to have the rest taken away by officials from the Attorney Generals office to be distributed to Kentucky.
Read more about the Colvin brothers here.
To protect yourself from coronavirus, check out the CDC’s website here. Stay informed about the death toll and cases in your country here. Refrain from social gatherings, wash your hands frequently, and try to maintain at least a 6 foot difference between yourself and others.
And please remember that there are 330 million Americans also needing supplies, and ~7.7 billion people across the planet preparing as well.
Feature Image via freeimages.com
