[Rich]

There seem to be a lot of people out there at the moment criticising the 3080 scalpers. This is disgusting. The 3080 scalpers are engaged in noble, righteous, entirely moral economic activity.

The fault for people's unhappiness lies entirely with Nvidia. if they really wanted to do right by their customers they would massively jack up the prices at launch and then gradually bring them down. They could then use the extra profits gained early on to subsidise lowering the prices even further once the retailers had a surplice stock over demand.

[Puffer Fish]

It seems to me scalpers in this sort of situation will never be able to raise the price over the longer term, since the company can always expand their supply.

The consumers paying higher prices are the ones who are demanding this now and don't want to wait.

These scalpers are serving a legitimate economic function, in a way. "Efficient" market rationing requires high prices.
If these scalpers did not exist, and assuming there was inadequate supply to meet initial demand, then the distribution would take place at random, or on a first come first serve basis, with a mad rush to get it before it sells out. And not everybody who wanted one would be able to get one.

This way, the people willing to spend the most money will be the people who get one.

Now, what can also happen is a situation where artificial scarcity is created by speculation, and this sort of situation could indeed by parasitic from an economic perspective.
If this is happening, the ideal response would be for the company to increase their prices to try to recoup the maximum of the end consumer price, and that's what they "should have done" in the first place according the maximize profit concept (at least on a micro scale).

[Rancid]

There seem to be a lot of people out there at the moment criticising the 3080 scalpers. This is disgusting. The 3080 scalpers are engaged in noble, righteous, entirely moral economic activity.

The fault for people's unhappiness lies entirely with Nvidia. if they really wanted to do right by their customers they would massively jack up the prices at launch and then gradually bring them down. They could then use the extra profits gained early on to subsidise lowering the prices even further once the retailers had a surplice stock over demand.

Indeed. The existence of a scalper market for any product just means the producer of the product priced their product too low. However, the producer cannot temporarly start with a high price, then drop it as the supply fills in. People simply do not like dynamic pricing, they see it as a shady business practice. However, for some reason, they are totally cool when scalpers engage in this.

[Rich]

We can never get rid of marketing bullshit, but we can do our bit to reduce it. Communist countries had marketing bullshit in spades it was just in a somewhat different form.

Computer hardware corporations seek to get favourable launch reviews by releasing their products at an artificially low prices. They do this because many people will watch the launch reviews over the whole of the product life cycle, although the launch reviews judgement on whether the product is good value can actually be meaningless at a later date.

In this particular case though Nvidia may be trying to lie about a price, that won't be delivered even once stock problems clear. The Founders edition will never be sold in significant quantities and customers will forced to pay for AIB cards at a considerable premium or accept a cooling solution well below the standard of the Founders Edition.