How to buy a drop
There are drops occasionally, where something special arrives on sale, limited time only, a one-off, and everybody’s gotta refresh to get one.
Of course you have better things to do, and so you discover that cool thing weeks later, and go to the first-party page where the drop happened to find that it is extremely sold out. Rather than flagellate yourself for missing the drop, you instead pause to say a note of gratitude that you were too busy living your actual life to know or care that this was happening, and now you are here, at an apparent dead end, fulfilled & happy.
Still, you wonder if the thing is available. You check third-party resale sites: eBay, Grailed, Postmark, StockX, etc. Most places have not heard of the cool new thing. One has, but it is not in your size. And finally, you find your thing, in your size, and it is $400 more than you would have paid for it had you refreshed for the drop like a good little consumer.
The goal, then, is not to get the thing. The goal is to manage your feelings around the thing having ever existed in the first place. There are plenty of substitutes for the thing, and you already own a few of them. Plus, being in the market for something usually doesn’t track with the moment of a drop, making drops inessential by definition.
What are drops, anyway? A way of exploring hyper-specificity? A route to a sense of self-actualization? A secret handshake for those in the know? A way to sell more through the manufacturing of artificial scarcity? The idea of “seasonality” taken to a hyper-extreme? Fandom? Why be a fan of a thing that just sells you stuff?