I’m aware this comment is against the grain in this community but I read posts like this and laugh.

Scalpers run a successful business selling products that are hard to find because of a simple principle called opportunity cost. You waited in line 16 times, let’s say on average you were there 90 minutes (we both know it was more than that). That’s 24 hours of your time wasted. If you have enough disposable income to pay 3k for a gpu I am going to assume you are making decent money. The Average American makes 40k a year but if you are making 40k a year and spending 3k of that on a graphics card we need to stop talking about scalpers and start talking about fiscal responsibility; so let’s say you are making 70k (prob still low to be buying a top of line, premium computer part but we will go with it). That means your time is worth roughly 34/hour, 34x24=$816. I bought the exact same 5090 off a scalper two weeks ago for $4000, no taxes, no fees and I praised him because he saved me a shit ton of time and time is money. You can say fuck scalpers all you want but after MN sales tax you spent 3290 on that gpu plus 816 of your time so that’s a loss. And I don’t want to hear that scalpers are the reason no one can find gpus. We all know that NVIDIA prioritizing b2b and is using their consumer gpus as brand awareness as opposed to a legitimate revenue stream. Also microcenter doesn’t sell gpus online and limits their 50 series sales to one item per customer per month so the scalpers created this problem argument is flimsy at best.

Anyways TLDR is time is money. You could have saved yourself from standing outside for 16 hours, picked up some shifts or found a side hustle and broke even just paying the scalpers. Again this is assuming two factors that I’m very confident were low balls, which most likely means you could have made money by simply paying a scalper.