Remember those guys last year who would drive around buying up all the masks, selling them online for 10x? You don't know why everybody hated them? This is why:
The original seller has a reputation to protect and doesn't want to be seen as taking advantage. Maybe it's a musician who would rather sell to kids who are willing to wait in line than to whoever has the most money. Maybe a pharmacy selling masks in 2020. The arbitrage opportunity is for somebody with no reputation or scruples, who chooses to see themselves as just an Angel of the Free Market. To everyone else, he's a jerk.
I like to call this line of thinking "capitalist determinism". Basically, if there is money to be made, it must be made. Letting any other concern interfere with this extracting of value is silly, or unnatural - even immoral.
People talk about it in these detached terms, call it laws of economics and say that it is something that happens naturally. But of course, when one remembers that these so-called laws of economics describes interactions between people, and that you always can choose what kind of influence you want to have on the world.
Remember those guys last year who would drive around buying up all the masks, selling them online for 10x? You don't know why everybody hated them? This is why:
The original seller has a reputation to protect and doesn't want to be seen as taking advantage. Maybe it's a musician who would rather sell to kids who are willing to wait in line than to whoever has the most money. Maybe a pharmacy selling masks in 2020. The arbitrage opportunity is for somebody with no reputation or scruples, who chooses to see themselves as just an Angel of the Free Market. To everyone else, he's a jerk.