Just a few manufacturers, consumers that don't have choices, astronomical prices...
Where have I seen this before?!
I wish a proper writer wrote about this. The Times one is terrible.
I had assumed this was going to be something to do with the Chinese daigou buying agents in Australia.
I was stuck in a pharmacy the other night behind 7 Chinese guys, all buying 4 cans of formula each (the limit), all sharing the same card.
I don’t think that is illegal exactly, but wow it’s annoying.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/australian-companies-still-need-...
I found the way they basically had to entrap her in the end to be a bit disconcerting. To have one of her suppliers introduce her to an undercover agent who is acting as a dodgy supplier and then wait for her accept the deal of a lifetime.
It's a staged deal and she accepts it. It's like being found guilty of thought crime.
The linked article says this about Alicia Tondreau-Leve:
When Dattadeen and Tondreau-Leve were still close, Tondreau-Leve
often spoke to her of her anger at losing the home she and her
husband had owned in Massachusetts — a stately four-bedroom
Colonial on an acre of land. Visiting from Florida, while Alan was
still living there, she found it so upsetting to be in the house,
which she knew by then that they would lose, that she sometimes
preferred to spend time in a rented R.V. Formula Mom became a means
of redemption and reinvention.
The Leves’ sentences struck me as severe, and I asked Pam Bondi,
the Florida attorney general, if she agreed. “I wish she’d been
locked up for as long as humanly possible for what she did,” she
said of Tondreau-Leve. “Had she used her wits to start a legit
business, she could have been incredibly successful — a true
entrepreneur.”
Before trial, the prosecutors presented a deal that would have meant much less
prison time for Alicia and mere probation for Alan.
Bondi has been criticized for election fundraising activities,
including questions raised about contributions from Donald Trump
and his associates. The Florida Attorney General's office received
at least 22 fraud complaints about Trump University. In 2013 a
spokesperson for Bondi announced her office was considering joining
a lawsuit initiated by New York's Attorney General against Trump
regarding tax fraud. Four days later 'And Justice for All', a PAC
that supported Bondi's re-election campaign received a $25,000
donation from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, after which Bondi
declined to join the lawsuit against Trump University.
If the formula ingredients are so cheap why not just buy each of the components in bulk and mix your own? The components are all listed on the packaging and can't be that difficult to obtain in bulk and good quality. The relative quantities I'm sure are proprietary but could easily be estimated from information available in pediatric nutritional literature (maybe paywalled but worth the investment).
Forget about counterfeits, just imagine how much of the 3rd-party stuff sold on Amazon must be stolen.
Here in Portland there was a recent bust of a lego theft ring. You have to wonder how much of this ends up on Amazon or ebay:
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2018/04/se_port...