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I've come across Amazon doing surge pricing before.

A pair of earbud headphones came up in an article praising them at their price point, so myself and a bunch of other people decided to buy them. They were $35. Amazon had it for sale through a bunch of resellers, and themselves for that price.

You couldn't order any of it though, it would error out and say it wasn't available right now.

I tried ebay, and got almost the exact same message from ebay on everyone selling those earbuds.

I ended up ordering it off of a 3rd site, which was already sold out, but honored the price.

In a few days, Amazon let it's sellers sell the item again, but around 2-3 times the original price.

It's interesting how they and Ebay blocked the sale of a suddenly 'hot' item like that, to price gouge everyone who had decided to purchase them.




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