Arbitrage nomads are stripping the carcasses of America's dying big-box stores and moving the choicest morsels into Amazon warehouses

Across America, semi-homeless "nomads" drive from big-box store to big-box store, hunting for items on clearance that Amazon customers are paying a premium for; when they find them, they snap them up and add them to the bins at Fulfillment by Amazon warehouses, whence they are shipped on to consumers.

The arbitrage is made possible by a combination of factors: the slow death of big-box retail, which is especially keen in out-of-the-way post-industrial casualties of the Great Recession means that there are stores at the end of every secondary road desperately trying to flog off the merchandise the locals don't want and/or can't afford. Then there's the retail cycle itself, which sees beloved products discontinued despite a faithful following, because that following simply isn't large enough to sustain the product (which is why the deadstock for the orphaned Bounce Dryer Bars sell in two-packs for $300; see also: Walmart pajama bottoms before they switched to a stiffer, less comfy cotton; and a discontinued brand of dental floss whose adherents pay $100 for a six pack that once retailed for $0.99; and discontinued flavors of cat-food that are the only thing that a beloved, aging pet will tolerate).

The nomads -- lovingly and beautifully profiled in a piece by Josh Dzieza for The Verge -- are like carrion beetles, stripping the carcasses of the dwindling brick-and-mortar retail industry, except that unlike carrion beetles, they don't consume the few useful morsels still left on the bones; instead, they ship them to Amazon, the pathogen that triggered the die-off, making it more deadly, and hastening the process. Read the rest