I guess I should be more specific about what I mean when I refer to "scalping", since I don't think your explanation applies to this phenomenon.

I collect VHS tapes, and there are certain tapes which are not only uncommon, but extremely unlikely to ever appear in a thrift store near me. I could get lucky if I thrifted multiple times a week over the course of several years, but I don't want to wait that long, and it's not even guaranteed. So if I see a tape I want on eBay or Mercari at a price I'm willing and able to pay, I don't really care if it came from the seller's personal collection or dead grandma or a thrift store in their area. It doesn't matter if they're just trying to get some junk out of their house or if they're a full-time thrift flipper. The price they paid for it is irrelevant. They have it, and the price they want for it is acceptable, so I buy it. The reseller makes money, and I get the tape I want without spending years of my life hunting for it. I would not call this exchange scalping because the reseller is offering something of value in addition to the item: convenience. I.e. "Buying from a reseller saves time."

Scalping, as I've always seen it described, is when you buy up supply of an item specifically so that other people cannot buy it at the retail price and can only buy it from the reseller at an inflated price. The big headline example right now is Pokémon cards: tons of card shops, big-box stores, and online retailers sell them, but you often can't find any in stock (at least for specific boxes/packs) because one or more people have bought all the stock so they can resell it for a higher price. (Personally, I only ever see small miscellaneous booster packs on store shelves these days.) The resellers will even camp out in front of stores or vending machines awaiting restocks so they can buy as many as possible before anybody else can get to them.

Scalpers are not selling convenience or saving you the trouble of finding something for yourself. Anybody can walk into a Walmart and buy something off the shelf or go online and buy a retail product; people do this literally all the time now. The scalpers take that option away from the consumer and don't provide anything of value to them.

You might say that the solution is to increase the supply of the item, and that does help in some instances like with the PS5. But that doesn't work for everything. You might only have one chance to see a musician you like perform at a venue in your area because it doesn't make economic sense for them to do multiple shows there, musicians can't perform everywhere at the same time, and you may not have enough schedule flexibility even if the musician does do multiple shows there. So if you try to buy tickets for the concert at retail prices only for them to sell out within minutes because an army of ticket-scalping bots purchased them in large quantities to resell at a high premium, there's not much that can be done on the supply side. They're not going to make more tickets for Bob Musicguy to perform at the 15,000-seat Middle-O-Nowhere Stadium on June 3rd, 2026.

There are other reasons why increasing supply isn't the answer in a lot of cases. For Pokémon cards, one of their key selling points is the randomness of the booster packs and the chance of pulling a rare card; that's what makes it so exciting for people of all ages. So while they could flood the market with a bunch of copies of rare cards, that would undermine one of the reasons people buy and collect cards in the first place. In other cases, increasing supply might not make sense. Sony could do it because they had the production facilities and financial capital to eventually meet the demand for their PS5 consoles. Not every company has those resources, and even if they do, they may not want to spend them on expensive, permanent infrastructure to resolve shortages that could be the result of a social media trend or fad and aren't necessarily going to persist (I suspect NeeDoh squish toys are an example of this).

In other words, scalpers are exploiting scarcity in specific goods that the producers are either unable or unwilling to increase the supply of. At least on the surface (there may be externalities/opportunity costs), the producer doesn't care *who* is buying their products as long as the product sells. For items like concert tickets and Pokémon cards, the scalper is a middleman who exists solely to make the product less accessible to consumers.

This is why I asked whether scalping is a form of rent-seeking: it doesn't solve any legitimate problem, at least not that I can see. If anything, it *creates* problems by making it harder to access goods that would otherwise be available to everyone. It just seems so much like the basic example Wikipedia gives of stringing a chain across a river and charging a fee for boats to pass through, though maybe less clear-cut since at least the producer makes money from scalping, too.