The title says it all, really. We've only just been able to add AMD's latest RX 6800 and 6800 XT graphics cards to our shopping carts in multiple etailers, but the cat is already out of the bag and into scalpers' pockets. This has been a recurring event for all gaming-related tech, from DIY PC parts to the latest-gen games consoles from both Microsoft and Sony. At this point, it becomes moot to talk about availability issues, or demand issues, or reaching a conclusion between the two - the stock just isn't there for anything gaming-related, period.

Some etailers are only selling their graphics cards in-person, as a way to both control flow of stock and protect themselves from scalpers buying up the entire inventory with recourse to some digital sidekicks that automate the purchase process, and then allow them to resell anything from graphics cards from NVIDIA to AMD, passing through AMD's latest Ryzen 5000 series and the Xbox Series X and PS5 gaming consoles.At a time where the COVID pandemic is still well underway and has actually been ever more pervasive and threatening in these winter months across the world (where winter months apply at this time of year, eh), the decision to only carry in-store inventory not only forces more people to enter possible infection scenarios, but also overturns the entire purchase process. Perhaps the time has come for etailers to actually review their online sale policies, and make things as hard as possible for scalpers to circumvent their (at times laughable) order mechanisms.Selling only a single graphics card per purchase, not allowing the same credit card or billing information to be used for copies of the same or comparable articles, introducing captchas for every finalized cart, not allowing shipment for the same address, instituting a queue system that removes the products from stock for all but the contacted customers, and even manual filtering of orders like NVIDIA instituted on their store - these would all be sensible, partial solutions to fix this problem for the consumer, whilst simultaneously protecting customers from (I'm sorry) pretty poor choices in demanding they physically go to a store to maybe be able to get that latest gaming console or graphics card.Of course, I guess for etailers, a sale is a sale, wherever and however it's done. They don't deal with the brand damage that surfaces from these practices, and they make their profit - as small as it sometimes is - all the same. For them, a card off the shelf is a card off the shelf, and that's that.