Factory ownership

As you can see, among other things I'm selling Eternal belt buckles. No, I'm not a blacksmith. No, I did not buy some underpriced belt buckles to relist them.

What I'm doing is buying materials for the buckle (around 55G), find a blacksmith, who create 10 buckles for 30-50G (3-5G/each), and sell the buckles for 95-100G. This means around 40G profit on each buckle. And I'm selling a lot.

What I'm doing now is the WoW equivalent of owning a factory. The owner buys the materials, hire hourly payed workers to do the work, and sell the product. If product price > material price + worker salaries, the factory is profitable.

Some may feel that this activity is somehow wrong. You are not alone with this feeling, the followers of a certain guy completely agree with you. However notice that if I wouldn't do it:

• the BS would not have 30-50G (unemployment). While he could buy the materials himself, craft the buckles and sell them himself (therefor acting as a small business owner), for some reason he decided not to. He may not have money for the materials of a single buckle, he may afraid that they don't sell, but most probably he has no clue about how profitable it is. Anyway, for his own reasons, he has chosen not to craft them himself, so the only way for him to make some money from buckles is being a payed employee in a buckle factory.
• the buyer would have to pay more for his buckle (assuming there are any in the AH), therefor have less money
  
• the sellers of the materials could sell less material, therefor had less money
• in the long run the material production would decrease, since no one farms saronite if no one buys it: overall recession

A businessmen seeks material supply (cheap saronite) and product demand (expensive buckle), and invest his own money to build a factory to connect these points for the good of all. His profit comes from this useful work for the society.

If his profit is "unfairly" huge, it's because he lacks competitors. If someone else would decide to also produce belt buckle, I would have to undercut him, decreasing my profit. Since I have to find a blacksmith, while a blacksmith doesn't have to find himself, I have an innate handicap against a blacksmith-businessmen, therefor if a blacksmith would decide to produce buckles in a larges scale, I'd be out of business in no time.

But until it happens, I keep on having huge profit on buckles and others. And you can have it too! Of course you can have a "factory" in other professions too. All you have to do is find a skilled payed employee, buy materials and sell products.