Life as a Sneakerhead

Sneakers are selling out in minutes and being resold on third party websites for sometimes more than triple the original price. The people behind this huge mark up in prices are called resellers. Resellers are individual merchants or companies that buy limited goods without any intention of consumption. Resellers have been seen as a problem to the average consumer dealing with many brands like Nike, Adidas, Jordan, and Supreme. As a person with a large interest in clothing and sneakers from these brands, I myself, have suffered as an average consumer at the hands of these resellers. In late 2015, Adidas and Kanye West released arguably the most popular shoe of the year in the Yeezy Boost 350. The shoe was set to release online at 8 and 10 a.m. and I had to get myself a pair. I waited on the product page until the shoe was set to drop at both of the release times, and I found myself automatically rerouting to a page that had stated Footlocker’s website had crashed due to the amount of traffic on the server. Before I could refresh back to the item page the shoe was sold out in all sizes and I had missed out. The only way past the traffic on the server was to use a “bot”, which is a software that cuts other online shoppers and automatically logs information into the website so that the customer may purchase the shoe in a matter of seconds after it becomes available. This is what most resellers will do in order to purchase limited items in large quantities to sell them after they have sold out.

Just hours later, the Yeezy Boost 350 was resold on eBay for up to $1,000. The shoes were sold for a ridiculous price because of the insane demand for the shoe that was left over from the release by the consumers that didn’t get a chance to get their hands on them. In this sequence of events, Adidas brings in around $200 profit from the original retail release, but the resellers of the shoes brought in up to $800 dollars, just for buying and reselling the shoes at a ridiculous price.