It's been going on for a decades in small batches.  Furbys, tickle me elmos, limited edition shoes, pretty much whatever was selling hot at the time.  However,  since the pandemic it's gotten out of hand.  Toilet paper,  hand sanitizer, bleach, paper towels, you name it.  Retailers were able to put mitigating factors in place to prevent this. 

Now it's Xbox series X, PS5, OLED Nintendo switches, and top of the line graphics cards. There is enough product out there for everyone to get one,  however scalpers are using bots to buy up all retail stock before any human possibly could, then they turn around and resell on those SAME RETAIL SITES for a massive markup. Today,  Wal-Mart had a series x drop. They put in place a "verify your human" button that the bots could bypass but humans could not. Out of the 14 thousand of us that were waiting for it in our discord channel, not one single human was able to get one. 

The anti bot measures are a joke at best. There's no verification of identities,  addresses, or purchase methods. No banning of proxy addresses used to mass buy retail products.  Worst of all they are allowing scalpers to sell on their platforms.  Yes there were shortages of chips, but that's been getting better. The majority of stock of these retail products is held by scalpers. 

We are petitioning that:

All major retailers put anti scalping measures that don't inhibit real people. 

Manufacturers stop selling to vendors who allow scalping. 

Most importantly,  that major store fronts stop allowing scalpers to list over priced, in- production items on their sites.