Jack Bayliss the Owner of Aftermarket Arbitrage claims his service helps young people set upon the path of becoming entrepreneurs. Bayliss runs a subscription service, where members pay him £30 a month to be informed of new restocks of valuable goods such as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X along with many other highly sought out goods. That being said, he has around 1500 subscribers which makes him £45,000 monthly that are now scalping goods and reselling them at high prices.
Although the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles have now been out for over a year it is still extremely difficult to pick one up. One of the main reasons for this problem is the extremely familiar semiconductor shortage. This shortage has made it quite difficult for Microsoft and Sony to be producing the quantities of consoles they would like to sell.
Jack Bayliss takes advantage of this shortage of supply and runs a profitable service helping scalpers make money in the market. During an interview with Sky News, he claimed this is “very in tune with my moral compass, as a person.” “But I get to see the flip side of the coin, the area that the media and the general public who hate us quote ‘scalpers’ [don’t see],” he added. He claimed how it is not wrong as for people who are desperate to get their hands on a £450 console, spending the extra £100 should not be a problem.
In the interview, he went on to speak about how his subscribers are now being able to make a good month’s salary in a few days by scalping 30 consoles. He mentioned how most of the subscribers of his service are quite young and how he sees that as a way they were showing a lot of initiative.
He told Sun News “What they’re doing is they’re being entrepreneurs, they’re going out, creating a side income, and they’re doing something that 90% of the population can’t be bothered to do.” While mentioning the pros about what he does, he said “They spend more time with the family, with their kids. We’ve had people who’ve been able to renovate their house, they bought the kids a climbing frame, they bought the wives new cars, they bought themselves new cars.”
A bill called the Gaming Hardware (Automated Purchase and Resale) Bill was brought forward in the UK Parliament in 2021 to stop bot-driven scalping in the UK. Although there is no confirmation that it will be the law. A group of US Democrats also introduced a new bill in December in an attempt to ban the use of bots to scalp high-value items including games consoles.
