Best Buy sells access to sold-out graphics cards for $200

American electronics retailer Best Buy has introduced a “Totaltech Membership” that allows customers to get access to the entire line of Geforce RTX-30 series cards. This membership costs customers a whopping $200 per year. After the membership was introduced, the graphics cards sold out in just a few hours.

Best Buy capitalizes on graphics card shortage

Best Buy was always a good retailer where you could still get graphics cards with a relatively high certainty. Especially for a graphics card from Nvidia’s Geforce RTX 30 series, the prices were not yet completely overpriced (like on the rest of the market), but on the contrary, still halfway affordable. But then Best Buy thought that they could surely somehow capitalize on this and introduced a so-called “Totaltech membership”, where you have to pay $200 to even get access to the complete range of graphics cards.

So you have to become an exclusive member to get these graphics cards. This “membership” is supposed to get you certain benefits, like faster shipping, free all-around support, and a 2-month return period. So basically what you should get anyway when you purchase such an expensive product.

Best Buy just sensed the desperation of customers and capitalized on it by offering a “membership” so you could get the products in the first place. And apparently people were desperate enough to throw another $200 down Best Buy’s throat for it, because the high-end RTX-30 graphics cards were all sold within a few hours. Not a single one remained.

Who are these high-paying customers really?

However, the buying customers were probably not the regular gamer or the average user, but rather miners and scalpers. Because they need the graphics cards especially urgently to rake in money.

Apparently Best Buy didn’t think about setting a limit for the graphics cards, because it seems that some people have bought several graphics cards (up to seven). This, of course, pushes the market incredibly, because resources are scarce, but miners are willing to put down a lot of money for the product. Retailers capitalize on this, which leads to higher prices, although many “normal” people and gamers can’t afford or don’t want to pay these prices anymore.

The problem with this is that this impudent rip-off has worked, and that means that other retailers could take a cue from this and copy it. Which is almost certainly going to happen, because it worked exceptionally well at Best Buy. This system could then expand to all other (electrical) products that are in hot demand or sell out quickly. Such a pay-to-win system is of course extremely tricky, especially for the normal gamer who simply needs a graphics card for gaming.