The "Cough Drop Kingpin" Experiment

The Hypothesis

"Retail Arbitrage" usually implies scanning barcodes at Walmart with a dedicated app, looking for clearance toys to flip on Amazon. My version was more... analog.

The theory was simple: If Store A is empty and Store B is full, and they are 3 miles apart, there is a margin in the middle. The inefficiency of local distribution is an opportunity, provided you aren't too proud to exploit it.

I did not wake up one morning planning to enter the pharmaceutical supply chain. It happened, as most strange financial discoveries do, because I was annoyed.

The Context

It was mid-January. The news was running constant segments about the "Tripledemic." Every pharmacy chain in my specific zip code had been picked clean of basic supplies. You couldn't find a lozenge within a five-mile radius of the city center.

The Shelf That Didn’t Add Up

Later that day, I drove twenty minutes out to a discount grocery store in the suburbs—one of those places where the lighting is dim and the aisles are narrow. And there, sitting on an endcap, was a mountain of brand-name cough drops. Hundreds of bags. Marked down. It didn't make sense. The city was dry; the suburbs were drowning in menthol.

The Extremely Sophisticated Strategy

I didn't use an app. I didn't check camelcamelcamel. I bought $40 worth of cough drops. I drove home. I listed them on eBay as a "Family Flu Pack."

"For 48 hours, I wasn't an unemployed project manager. I was the Cough Drop Kingpin of the Tri-State Area."

The Unexpected Part

They sold instantly. Not to gougers, but to tired parents who just didn't want to drive to three different stores. The gap wasn't just price; it was convenience. I was effectively charging a "finder's fee" for correcting a local supply chain error.

The Real Lesson

The humor wore off quickly. What stayed was the realization that money often moves through places that aren’t glamorous. We are trained to think business means "Innovation" or "Tech." Sometimes, business is just moving a bag of sugar from the shelf where no one wants it to the shelf where everyone needs it.

I stopped asking "What business should I start?" and started asking "Where is something failing quietly?"