Two Tennessee brothers in the US, who bought 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer and sold some of them for as much as $70 each to profit off the coronavirus outbreak say they have received death threats after being shamed on social media.
Matt and Noah Colvin of Hixson, Tenneseee, drove 1,300 miles across the state and neighboring Kentucky earlier this month after the first coronavirus death was reported in the United States.
In total, they spent between $10,000 and $15,000 stocking up on the items which are now in demand thanks to the global pandemic that has killed thousands and will likely infect many more.
‘The bulk of it was purchased just driving around to retail stores in the Chattanooga area,’ Matt Colvin told WRCB-TV.
Matt Colvin then stayed at his home near Chattanooga, where he was expecting deliveries of boxes of even more sanitizer, cleansing products, and surgical masks.
Colvin told The New York Times that he began listing some of the products on Amazon – and was selling them at a considerable markup.
‘It was crazy money,’ he told the Times.
Colvin, like other online resellers, bought the items at the store for reasonably priced sums. A bottle of Purell hand sanitizer normally sells for $1 each.
On Amazon, he charged $20 for a two-pack set, according to the Times.
Colvin defended himself against accusations he was price gouging, saying that the cost of delivering it to customers as well as Amazon’s commission eat into profits.
He said that anti-price gouging laws in Tennessee and elsewhere are not suitable to the current digital age.
‘They’re built for Billy Bob’s gas station doubling the amount he charges for gas during a hurricane,’ Colvin said of the laws currently on the books.
‘Just because it cost me $2 in the store doesn’t mean it’s not going to cost me $16 to get it to your door,’ he said.
When asked if he felt badly about turning a profit by selling products that prevent the spread of a lethal virus, Colvin countered that he was just correcting ‘inefficiencies in the marketplace.’
‘There’s a crushing overwhelming demand in certain cities right now,’ he said.
Amazon, however, put a stop to it, pulling his items as well as thousands of other listings for hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and antibacterial wipes.
The online retailer warned its sellers that it would cancel their accounts entirely if they continued their price gouging.
Colvin was then left with a supply of nearly 18,000 bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packages of wipes and nowhere to sell them – at a time when store shelves were emptied out and people were frantically looking to buy them.
Colvin told the Times that after Amazon shut him down, he would look to sell the products locally.
‘If I can make a slight profit, that’s fine,’ he said.
The avalanche of negative reaction prompted the Colvin brothers to pledge to donate the inventory they have to those in need.
The Colvins also deleted their social media accounts. Matt Colvin also posted a web site with the message: ‘The Hand Sanitizer in the NYT story is being donated to a local church and first responders tomorrow.’
‘Thanks for outing this guy and hurray for public pressure,’ one Twitter user wrote to the Times reporter who posted the story.
Another resident of Hixson tweeted: ‘This morning I Tweeted I would make sure everyone in my town would know Matt & Noah Colvin’s names by the end of the day.
One Twitter user blasted the brothers as ‘conmen’ and ‘snake oil salesmen’ and suggested that there was a more proper way to ‘handle’ them besides ‘suing them in court.’
Another Twitter user tweeted: ‘When you are forced to do the right thing, is it really doing the right thing?’
One Twitter user said the Colvins’ pledge to donate the unsold items was too little, too late.
‘Too late, dude just ruined his entire life,’ the Twitter user wrote.
‘Now every time he or his kid Googles his name, he’s gonna come up as the Great Value Martin Shkreli.’
Shkreli is the former ‘pharma bro’ who became notorious for raising the price of the anti-parasitic drug Daraprim by more than 5,000% while serving as chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, now known as Phoenixus AG.
Meanwhile, the public outrage prompted the Tennessee attorney general to threaten the Colvin brothers with legal action if they kept on buying medical products.
