Author: jeromekatz

‘Flesh and blood robots for Amazon’: They raid clearance aisles and resell it all online for a profit – The Washington Post

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Juston, 30, and Kristen, 28, estimate they can reel in $150,000 this year from their newest gig: retail arbitrage. The basic idea is to buy up a bunch of the same item — from water bottles to vacuums to Monopoly boards — and then resell them online for a handsome profit.

For some, this is just a lucrative side hustle — perhaps to climb out of debt or save up for a Disney World vacation. For others, it has become their primary way of earning a living. And beyond that, the Herberts say, this work is helping them save $50,000 so they can adopt a child.

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How business-to-business startups reduce inequality | TechCrunch

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What do AWS, WeWork, Stord, Gusto and RocketLawyer have in common? They provide cloud computing services, office space, warehouse storage, payroll management and access to legal templates, respectively — at first glance, not a particularly congruent set of services.

But they are alike in the economic purpose they serve for their customers. Each of these services takes a fixed cost — a bank of servers, a lease, a legal retainer — and transforms it into a variable cost. As a refresher, a fixed cost stays constant regardless of output, and variable costs scale with the output of a business.

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