It’s Friday, April 24th at 7:45AM. The sunlight is beaming through my window and I’m sleep deprived after falling asleep at 2AM. Eye bags aside, I open my laptop in hopes of obtaining one of the most sought after Supreme products: the box logo t-shirt. I make this a big deal in the name of fashion and my love for Takashi Murakami’s art. I was beyond excited to be awake for something that roughly 17,000 could also own. The real question was, “Am I actually going to get this shirt?”
The Supreme brand wanted to give back to the community–by collaborating with artist Takashi Murakami , and combined their iconic works to produce a Supreme box logo shirt, surrounded by Takashi Murakami’s renowned rainbow daisies. This product truly brings together “hype beasts” and art enthusiasts. The best part? The $60 shirt proceeds went directly to the COVID-19 Relief fund. Nothing better than supporting a well-recognized brand like Supreme, paired with “The Andy Warhol of Japan”, and all of the proceeds going towards a good cause during these strange times.
I went ahead and took my chance with this, fully aware of the fact Supreme customers and resellers often opt for paying for “bots” on the Internet (ranging from $60-$600). These bots are designed to save credit card information and guarantee a successful checkout. By doing this, you save the time of manually entering your credit card and shipping information–and eliminate getting “cart jacked” like a normal customer. I went ahead and disregarded the bot option, as I wasn’t willing to spend so much on something I could not fully trust.
The clock hits 8:00AM, I refresh the page and there’s nothing there. That only means one thing: the website crashed. Most likely due to the amount of bots that infiltrated the page, causing the website to act up for everyone else. I refresh at 8:04! The shirts finally show, I click “Medium” then add to cart. Why isn’t the “Add to Cart” button processing this? Oh my! It finally adds to the cart. I proceed to checkout–why isn’t my autofill working? I have to manually add my shipping information now, great. As soon as I type in my info to complete the payment–it freezes, and then says: “Please remove this item from your cart” with the red text that spells: “Sold out.” That’s right, I got “cart jacked” and I am bitter!
Minutes after this fiasco, I went ahead and checked the popular, credible reselling website called StockX. Straight away, resellers hiked up the original price of $60 to nearly $1,200 for the Supreme x Murakami COVID-19 Relief BOGO shirt. Granted, Supreme has basically established itself as a luxury brand, paired with Takashi Murakami’s work which is featured in museums all around the world–why are people doing this? Attempting to profit from a $60 shirt for charity, but trying to make triple the amount for personal gain! The most disheartening thing was seeing how greedy these resellers could be, knowing they bought as many bots as they could to buy out the stock–just so they could turn around and resell these products 3x higher and not even use those profits for COVID-19, but in the name of personal gain.
Unfortunately, some people are letting the resellers win. Already, three shirts from StockX had sold for $700, $812, and $900. Why are people allowing this to happen? Although the shirt is beautiful and unique–people shouldn’t stoop this low to fill the pockets of greedy, money hoarding individuals that we call “resellers”.
When going forward, I hope Supreme recognizes that only selling 17,000 of these shirts is not the right way to go, especially as they could be contributing $1,000’s more with a design like this! If customers are going to be heartless through profiting off a pandemic, I hope that Supreme finds the heart to produce more of these shirts, and does this out of hopes of giving back to the community, and helping find a solution to COVID-19.
Photo Courtesy of: hypebeast.com
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