Until you pee out the champagne you bought with the check that cleared

April 25, 2022 2:22 PM

A surprisingly sympathetic story about a pandemic glove hustler who found friendship and love along the way. As the world shut down in March 2020, anxious knowledge workers barricaded themselves at home, scrubbing produce with soap. Fear sometimes manifested as altruism: checking on neighbors, organizing mutual aid. But the crisis also prompted cynics to root around for new loopholes to exploit, for ways to raise prices, feign hardship, get a rent reduction, slack off. For every person who spent that spring self-soothing with Animal Crossing or struggling to manage small children, there was someone else out there thinking, “How can I take advantage of the chaos?” This is a story about one of those people.
posted by fiercecupcake (29 comments total)

On a minor (?) note: altruism and mutual aid aren’t necessarily (or even commonly) based in fear. Kind of a weird way to phrase that.
posted by eviemath at 3:09 PM on April 25, 2022 [9 favorites]

Thanks for sharing; well written, and I find people like Kaplan mildly fascinating since I've never personally known well anyone like that: those hustlers who are so adamant about finding the next big economic opportunity: whether it's crypto, sport trading cards, CBD, sneakers, NFTs, or in this case, gloves and PPE.

Rob instantly reminded me of Mike Ehrmantraut from the breaking bad/BCS universe.
I admittedly only have an iota of sympathy for Kaplan; although that could be colored by the fact that I've had a long, stressful day.
He realized he was ready to consider someone else’s needs besides his own again - wow, there's several more ways to consider someone else's needs besides marriage, buddy!
posted by fizzix at 3:37 PM on April 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

Maybe I'm reading this uncharitably -- and I'm supposed to be quitting my uncharitability habit -- but this comes off to me as "BREAKING: Would-be Pandemic Gouger In Over Head, Repeatedly Burned by Fraudsters and Supply Chain" and while it is indeed a sympathetic story because the poor guy was swimming way out of his depth, I find it hard to empathize with the mentality that got him there. There's a certain type of person whose every waking moment seems to be dedicated to exploitation and value extraction and it's just, I dunno, not something I think the world needs more of.
posted by majick at 3:40 PM on April 25, 2022 [22 favorites]

I honestly tried to read this article with an open mind, but the words blurred as I kept remembering some of the low points of the last two years: nurses walking around in garbage bags; morgues overflowing; Trump dismantling basic government services and stealing PPE from states to sell it through other grifters; nearly one million dead Americans; and so on and so on and so on. I'm sure there will be someone there to disagree with me for the sake of disagreement, but those memories will stay with me. As I'm sure they will stay with others. Best of luck to Verge and the writer.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:50 PM on April 25, 2022 [13 favorites]

Uh, yeah. Good luck, Milla.
posted by HotToddy at 4:32 PM on April 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Interesting article. Thanks! Despite hating capitalism, I'm pretty open to the idea that price-gouging during disasters can be a good thing; if the state has failed and usual networks have failed, incentivizing someone to travel a hundred miles to sell batteries or ice at a profit to the person who is willing to pay the most may actually be the least-bad, realistic option. But, this emergency was non-local and we mostly would have been better able to provide for everyone without this sort of thing. It's hard to sympathize.

Falling in love with someone through machine translation also seems a little suspicious; but, who knows. If there are two hustlers here, that's two less the rest of us have to deal with. If only one, best of luck to their spouse.

Also, they're hoarding gloves in July 2021? At that point, aren't you just in the ordinary, barely-profitable glove-distribution business? I buy thousands of gloves a year. I'm glad someone's doing the job. But, it doesn't seem like a promising get-rich-quick scheme. It's the kind of thing salaried people sitting at desks at Fisher Scientific spend time thinking about.
posted by eotvos at 4:51 PM on April 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

There is never a shortage of grifters, skilled or otherwise...
posted by jim in austin at 4:58 PM on April 25, 2022

So he never actually successfully grifted did he? I mean, I guess he did since he lives in a luxury beachfront Florida condo as a in-home dog walker, at least prior to COVID. But that was before the story even started. Wonder where all the money comes from...
posted by The_Vegetables at 5:13 PM on April 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

This guy can find love and I can't?!?! (Though as a friend of mine points out, even the worst dudes can get a lady.)

That said, I dunno, I kinda started sympathizing with him after awhile, weirdly enough. I'm not at all clear on the business stuff going on here, but it sounds like he was being scammed and hustled far more than anything he did on his own?
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:22 PM on April 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Put me in the unsympathetic column:

“If you take a marketplace and flood it with disinformation, the people who are really looking for that product get desperate very quickly, and when people are desperate, they’ll pay any price,” he said. It reminded him of a gig he’d had many years back, in a “ruse room” at a recruiting firm. His job was to call hiring managers and pretend to be various job applicants, all of whom would flake on their interviews, driving the hiring manager crazy, such that when his recruiting firm ultimately called and offered a real and reliable applicant, that person was much more likely to get the job.

Sounds like the worm finally turned.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:45 PM on April 25, 2022 [8 favorites]

...as a friend of mine points out, even the worst dudes can get a lady.

(Forgive the heteronormativity but) it's funny how at this great big junior high school dance we call life, people line up on opposite sides of the gym and two groups who can't even meet each other's eyes mutter this.

Uh, yeah. Good luck, Milla
Falling in love with someone through machine translation also seems a little suspicious...

I experienced both of these reactions and it's a little sad to me that I did. It's totally believable that Lieutenant Junior Grade Exploitation up there could be taking advantage of someone not thriving in a foreign land, just as it's at least a little plausible that both parties have mixed motivations.
posted by majick at 6:46 PM on April 25, 2022

Only halfway through the article because I keep being distracted by those beautiful graphics.
posted by bendy at 7:04 PM on April 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

I recall 2 things from back around April 2020:

- masks were a good thing, but the media-front doctors were hesitant about saying that because they didn't want a run on the supply for health care professionals...

- videos of morons racing their shopping carts though Costco to buy up all of the toilet papers...
posted by ovvl at 7:05 PM on April 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

It just goes to show, you can’t spell glove without love.
posted by panama joe at 7:07 PM on April 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

No glove no love.
posted by bendy at 7:08 PM on April 25, 2022

This guy can find love and I can't?!?!

It depends on your standards for love.
posted by bendy at 7:12 PM on April 25, 2022 [5 favorites]

Despite hating capitalism, I'm pretty open to the idea that price-gouging during disasters can be a good thing;

You might have to come to terms with something here.
posted by mhoye at 7:22 PM on April 25, 2022 [9 favorites]

The art is nice. The story is a whole bunch of nothing. He sat at a keyboard for over a year in chat rooms failing to do anything useful. He had no experience with business in SEA, and will never know what really happened. The article sets you up for a story that goes somewhere, and it just goes nowhere. I don't understand why it was even written. That may sound harsh, and maybe it is. There doesn't even seem to be any verifiable truth that he did the majority of this as nothing resulted from it. We know he didn't do any good, so was he just interacting with a pool of other scammers or did he interfere with actual business that provided PPE to the people that needed it? I don't know.. it clearly got under my skin.
posted by joelr at 7:40 PM on April 25, 2022 [7 favorites]

Something about the grind. Always the grind.
posted by sjswitzer at 7:51 PM on April 25, 2022

I'm amazed at how quickly this article skims past the murder threat? Like there are a lot of red flags here but if someone is threatening to murder their business associates over a deal that has gone badly and you're writing a sympathetic story on them maybe think twice about that?
posted by wesleyac at 8:34 PM on April 25, 2022 [4 favorites]

There are tiresome people in the world who cannot understand anything people do which might be slightly inefficient or does not make them money. Even in low-stakes hobby stuff. I think these are the same people always looking for the get-rich-quick angle on any situation, who cannot look at a piece of vacant land in the middle of nowhere without seeing a future housing development, etc. Fewer of this sort, please.
posted by maxwelton at 12:37 AM on April 26, 2022 [4 favorites]

I reflected on this a bit more and maybe, just maybe, I'm going to soften my reaction a little. I've been subject to intermittent poverty of the "where am I sleeping" / "I haven't eaten in 5 days" variety. I've suffered just being broke as fuck, where someone gifting me a big ass Costco box of spaghetti (it was cool, they were like triple long!) adjusted the course of my life. I've felt desperation over being on the wrong end of scarcity.

I don't think that's where this guy is coming from but I get that the unethical approach starts singing a siren song when your belly is empty enough for long enough. Poverty mindset leaves real damage.

We still don't need more of these kind of people in the world in my opinion however as a reaction to trauma, at least, it's understandable why we get some fraction of them.
posted by majick at 6:34 AM on April 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

My other thought it I've never connected with The Devil Wears Prada because the Miranda Priestly speech about choosing sweater colors is true of every job. Like this yahoo thinks he's going to hop into a message chatroom and know as much about surgical gloves, supply chains, and shipping as the legions of people who do that professionally every day - who spend 30 hours a week in meetings with coworkers discussing gloves? LOL.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:23 AM on April 26, 2022

Like this yahoo thinks he's going to hop into a message chatroom...

Humans are staggeringly bad at understanding scale. An approximately street-hustler level dude like this is not, without some education or exposure, going to even know what he doesn't know about large scale logistics. People love to apply their small-scale intuitions to large scale problems by just assuming the numbers are bigger. Hell, I was guilty of doing this for years about all kinds of things before I started to learn.

It may not actually be A Thing but it's really hard not to see Dunning-Kruger types of effects all over the place. People just don't do a good job of estimating their expertise, on the whole. Guy here was, among other things, a victim of that trap.
posted by majick at 8:35 AM on April 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

I’d like to comment on what a miserable worm the antihero of the piece was, but after the second “ooh, let’s have some electric-colored stuff crawl around and distract the reader” picture thing, I’m outta here. I guess it’s a strategy: distracting “art” will defocus attention from our story. It’s just a *dumb* strategy.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 11:10 AM on April 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

I was impressed by how little got accomplished. Like he got someone else scammed out of ~250k, but didn't see a dime apparently. He made friends with a few folks, one of which may have helped in the afore mentioned scam. It's just an interesting choice to write this when it's really not made clear that he did anything other than waste a bunch of time.
posted by Carillon at 2:04 PM on April 26, 2022

Despite hating capitalism, I'm pretty open to the idea that price-gouging during disasters can be a good thing;

You might have to come to terms with something here.

I don't mean to start an argument and will bow out after this and read comments without responding. But, if millions of Keynesians are allowed to say, "capitalism is great, except in the hundreds of cases where it clearly fails and the state needs to step in," it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to say, "capitalism is bad, except in a very few specific cases where every alternative has failed and the state probably shouldn't interfere with things that might save more lives." Maybe that's a low bar to feel proud of reaching. But, it's the bar economists and newspapers have set. (I'm also not at all certain I'm right. I am pretty certain emergencies are different, hard to plan for, and need special rules.)
posted by eotvos at 2:37 PM on April 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

People love to apply their small-scale intuitions to large scale problems by just assuming the numbers are bigger
This was my thought pretty early in reading the piece. Like so many others, he saw an opportunity to siphon off a few cents in the dollar on a worldwide emergency, but he would have been far better looking to operate much more locally (where he had some ability to actually operate) because he clearly had no idea of the logistics involved in getting a glove from one side of the world to the other. I also found it funny that a lifelong hustler had to go through all of that just to find out he wasn't special at all - just a small fish hustler in a very large pond of hustlers with skills and knowledge far exceeding his own.
posted by dg at 8:58 PM on April 26, 2022

There's so much sketchiness it's hard to believe the writer is that naive - but I didn't realize how much fraud and grifting there was in the pandemic PPE supply chain, so I guess I learned that.
posted by blue shadows at 11:14 PM on April 26, 2022