Scalpers gouge China's fanbois for Genius Bar appointments

Chinese scalpers have found a new way to make a few extra yuan: book up all the Genius Bar slots in the nation’s Apple Stores then sell them on at a profit. Black market traders are snapping up time slots months in advance and then charging 10-40 yuan (£1-4) for each appointment on third party sites like the popular C2C …

[Rampant Spaniel]

So not entirely dissimilar to the banks little aluminium can collection scheme. Lets see which one ends up being stopped and which is allowed to continue.

[Cliff]

What bank and scheme is this? I've not heard of it, sounds bizarre?!

[LarsG]

Enterprising if nothing else

[Rampant Spaniel]

It's a new way of making money through dubious methods. Basically the banks stockpile Aluminum in warehouses to control supply. The law says they must move X amount out each day but doesn't stop them moving it to another warehouse so they make a fortune driving up the price and all they have to do is move it around different warehouses.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100901270

has a more detailed picture. Basically controlling the supply of a resource purely to make profit.

[Anonymous Coward]

WHEN YOU GIVE LOADS OF MONEY TO POLITICIANS AND THEIR FRIENDS IN THE CITY, YOU CAN BREAK THE LAW TOO!!!!

[Cliff]

>>Basically the banks stockpile Aluminum

>>Basically the banks stockpile Aluminium

Massive abuse of power. Pure capitalism breeds this kind of thing. This is Thatcherism in its extreme - she once said 'you can't buck the market' and this is the logical end-point of not interfering in the market. De Beers do it with diamonds (but who cares, they're for mugs anyway), but artificial manipulation of price for an important utility material is crappy.

[Destroy All Monsters]

Re: >>Basically the banks stockpile Aluminum

>>Pure capitalism breeds this kind of thing.

This industrial dance has been choreographed by Goldman to exploit pricing regulations set up by an overseas commodities exchange

1) Goldman Sachs

2) Pricing Regulations

Pure capitalism? Yeah right. You must be a fan of the fat baseball-cap wearing filmmaking nincompoop.

[Cliff]

easy one to stop

If Apple just make you enter the serial number of the device at booking time, pretty tough one for an advance scalper to guess...

[JetSetJim]

Re: easy one to stop

or even just link it to an (unchangeable) iTunes account that has a device attached to it - a no show then blacklists the account.

[Richard 120]

The profit machine

Surely the way to do it would be for Apple to charge the fee, basically become the middle man, find the price point which people are prepared to pay (I think the touts have already done this), resulting in the profit going to the megacorp, rather than the touts.

Drive the competition out of business.

[Gil Grissum]

Really??

I thought you had to make a genius bar appointment by either calling the Apple store to make that appointment of logging on to the Apple website with your Apple ID and making the appointment. Why would anyone go to some third party website to pay for something that Apple doesn't even charge for, unless the scalpers are logging on to the Apple website to reserve all of the available genius bar time slots? Wouldn't someone at the Apple store notice that the person who shows up for the appointment isn't the person who made the appointment? And given the low market share of the iPhone in China (necessitating the introduction of a plastic iPhone to spur sales in China and hopefully get China Mobile and China Telecom interested in selling the iPhone 5C to customers), how many punters there are really paying for genius bar appointments?

[Pascal Monett]

Well that's it for Communism then

One thing you have to admit, the Chinese are just about as capitalistic as it is possible to be. There is apparently nothing they will not latch on to and transform for profit, whatever the domain, and consequences be damned.

I'd keep that in mind the next time you hear somebody complaining about how the Government is preventing free enterprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple support sucks

This just demonstrates how crappy Apple's support is. They can't even provide enough support staff to keep the "required" number of slots open so you don't have to wait a month or more to get one. If they had enough supply (staffed their support centers properly) then there wouldn't be a market as the demand would be met.