Why don't Amazon, Target, Walmart implement product queueing?

Question

For products like hand sanitizer and masks, why can't there be orderly queues, with quotas, so that everyone can be treated fairly? As a software engineer, I find myself seriously considering writing scrapers to watch over the product pages and notify my wife when something is in stock. It's madness for her to be clicking a dozen pages throughout the day to try and "snag" a couple of these in-demand products.It seems so easy to grab a couple of engineers and implement a rudimentary pre-order system (pretty sure they already have pre-ordering of some sort).Anyone with the inside knowledge know what's going on? Is this a political issue?

caryd · Accepted Answer

People would forget and abuse the return policy. Also, they constantly change prices so you would either get screwed or lock into a price the seller doesn't want to offer for a billion orders.

PaulHoule · Answer

You mean I would go on the web site and say I want product X and then I have dibs on the Nth next one to be available, say three hours or three weeks later?

WheelsAtLarge · Answer

https://www.nowinstock.net/This site does something similar to what you want.