Bah humbug to cyber-scalpers. (Nasty little Grinch Bots.)

I’ve been volunteering the past few years for Christmas in the City, a 100% volunteer charity that puts on a big holiday party for kids living in homeless shelters, and also provides families in need with toys for their children. Between the holiday party and the toy drive, we’re talking thousands upon thousands of presents under one big metaphorical tree.

One of my CITC tasks this year involved working on our wishlist, the Amazon gift registry that contains the toys we could use the most. Each year, we add a few items to it, and take a few items off. The toys on the list run pretty much anywhere from $10-15-ish to $40 (or somewhere in the vicinity of $40). In any case, nothing over $50. At least that was the case when we added new items in November.

Then, what to our wondering eyes did appear but a $30 baby doll that’s now going for $70!

And then there are the Fingerlings. No, we’re not talking fingerling potato here. A Fingerling is a little monkey-like creature that you wrap around your finger. When we added them to our list, they were about $13, as I recall. Now, well, would you pay $50 for this littler piece of crap? I sure wouldn’t, and I hope that no one buying gifts for Christmas in the City does, either. (I just put a caveat emptor warning on our FB page.)

On the news last night, I even heard that they were going for $1,000 on eBay, but I checked just now, and that tulip bulb madness seems to have passed. Still, they’re in the upper-$40’s on Amazon.

Bah humbug to these cyber-scalpers is all I can say.

Mostly, I’m not all that anti-scalper.

I don’t mind the “got tickets?need tickets?” guys outside of Fenway.  I don’t mind an individual standing in physical or virtual line to buy up tickets.  And in real life, I’m guessing that when they’re out there at game time, they’re working for scalping reseller sites. But when the acquisition is all electronic, and a human really can’t compete, that really pisses me off.

I can’t stand it when I have to pay a lot more for a concert ticket because some scalper-bot has sucked up all the inventory the moment the tickets are released. But whoever’s producing the concert doesn’t care, as long as the venue sells out.

Ditto for the scalping reseller sites for sporting events.

But I guess if I want to pay an inflated price for a ticket to see Springsteen or the Red Sox, well, whatever the market can bear…

I suppose I should feel the same way about scalping toys. But I don’t. I hate the cyber-scalpers for running up the price of Fingerlings. They are especially insidious, even though I think it’s really dumb for anyone to get caught up in the ‘toy of the moment’ mania. Still, a pox on the cyber-scalpers’ Grinch bots.

Online scammers with an arsenal of cyberbots are stealing Christmas by buying up the most popular toys of the season and selling them for a hefty markup on third-party sites such as Amazon and eBay.

While the demand for the hottest toys is particularly high this time of year, shoppers are competing against a growing army of bots. For years, scalpers have taken advantage of software robots to scoop up event tickets, but now scammers are employing the same tactics to cheat Christmas shoppers, says MSNBC anchor and economics correspondent Ali Velshi.

"Regular people could never buy them at face value," he tells Here & Now's Robin Young. "The idea that it was bots — scalpers using algorithms — to buy up all the tickets in the first place, and then sell them either via a third-party vendor or independently to people, and this has now moved its way into the hot holiday toy sales industry." (Source: NPR)

We’ve long had these toy scarcities. Remember the Cabbage Patch Kids shortage? Ticket Me Elmo?

But that was pre-“complex algorithm”, which just seems so unfair.

Even though I think it is completely ridonculous to get caught up in hot pursuit of the hottest gifts, which just feeds into our plastic-fantastic, overwrought, junk consumer goods economy.

Can you say mixed emotions?

I guess the thing to do is to try bricks and mortar, where it’s unlikely that someone will be trying to sell a Fingerling for $1,000. Or do what my parents would do, back in my slightly post-Little House in the Prairie childhood, when Christmas was a relatively subdued affair -  a couple of toys, crayons and Play-Do in your stocking, flannel PJs.

If they hadn’t gotten around to getting us (or, in my mother’s case, making us) something that they had planned to – which I promise you was not very likely to be anything flashy from anyone’s gotta have it list – my mother would wrap up a picture of the item. There you go, kids!

But that was when deferred gratification and refusal to be caught up in consumer frenzies were considered best practices for raising kids.

Ah, the good old days, before we had Grinch bots gobbling up all those Fingerlings.