Brothers, can you spare a hand santizer?
Matt and Noah Colvin cooked up a get-rich scheme to glom all of the antibacterial wipes and hand sanitizers they could find after the first U.S. coronavirus was reported March 1 and make a killing on the re-sale, according to a New York Times interview.
The Colvins — piloting a silver SUV — snapped up all the sanitizers they could find across Tennessee and Kentucky. They thought they were on the road to Easy Street when the first 300 bottles of hand sanitizer they purchased sold out for between $8 and $70 a pop, which was “multiples higher than what he had bought them for,” the Times story said.
EBay is prohibiting any US sales of masks or sanitizer
The brothers cleaned out a Dollar Tree, a Walmart, Staples and Home Depot and bought thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes from “little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods,” the Times reported.
“It was crazy money,” Matt Colvin told the paper.
However, Amazon got wise to the pandemic price gouging and pulled his items and thousands of other listings for hand sanitizers, face masks and wipes, the Times reported.
EBay “soon followed with even stricter measures, prohibiting any US sales of masks or sanitizer,” the story said.
While millions of Americans are hustling to get their hands on the hygiene products, the Colvin brothers are saddled with a garage filled with 17,700 bottles of sanitizer they can’t sell.
“It’s been a huge amount of whiplash,” Matt Colvin told The Times. “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?’”
Map of coronavirus cases in the US
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