David Flashner thought he had it wired: buy two iPhones last Friday when they first went on sale, keep one and sell the other at a profit so big it would pay for most of the first one.

Flashner wasted no time. He began advertising the extra phone while still in line at an Apple store. During his 21-hour wait, he posted half a dozen different ads to Craigslist— with prices ranging from $800 to $1,200 — and waited for the calls to come in. But no calls came as consumers expect that stores will soon have phones in stock. He continued to advertise the extra phone through the weekend, and ended up with just one call, which went nowhere. On Wednesday, he returned the phone.

Flashner, 25, who manages an audio-visual equipment rental company, is not the only would-be iPhone reseller whose plan failed to follow the script. “I haven’t heard of a single person who sold one,” he said.

Across the nation, people looking to make a quick and easy profit bought one, two or as many phones as they could by recruiting friends to stand in line with them. Many of them were the first to get in line, camping overnight outside the stores. But now they are finding that the iPhone is much more like a Harry Potter book than a hard-to-find Wii video game machine: a great thing to be one of the first to own, but not high in resale value because supply is not constrained.

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