Tangential but I’m really over this artificial scarcity thing. I’d be happy to give my money to Nike/Jordan brand for a pair of those sneakers, but they decide to make tiny quantities to keep the hype up. I guess it works well for them but it sucks for customers, just like too many things these days.
Adidas and Nike both settled on random selection of people who try to buy, people being over the secondary market (there will always be a drop next month), and a sad combination of Kanye destroying himself, Virgil dying and Nike becoming mostly extremely boring and safe have resulted in a market where people who actually like sneakers can get what they want at retail but maybe not everything. Seems like usually the only thing with any regular after market hype are Travis Scott releases, but regular people are still getting them without anywhere near the filth of middle men sellers that used to be in the market.
The scarcity is the product. It's basically a nifty hack that activates a "holy cave tigers, a resource shortage, I need to get this" reflex in human brains. Acquiring the rare product is a rush and that and admission to/status in an group is most of what the money gets you. A few dollars' worth of fabric and plastic and maybe leather is thrown in as a token. If they made enough of them, they'd just be foot-coverings and no one would care much.
There's nothing wrong with it as such, as long as it's consensual, plenty of the human lived experience is about tickling biological reflexes that might seem a bit wierd if you were an alien looking in. It just often (even mostly) seems to be dishonestly presented to the consumer (aka much of marketing).
