Arbitrage means buying something where the price is cheap and reselling it where the price is high. A entrepreneurial pharmacist from Germany did just that after discovering, while on vacation in the late 1970s, that Benadryl sold in the UK for one-third of the price it normally fetched in Germany.
He checked the ingredients on the bottle’s label.
“Sometimes you have a product which has the same name and a different composition, but it was the same product,” Mohringer, 66, says.
Clad in olive trousers and a shirt unbuttoned at the collar, he leans against the desk in his spare, white office in Saaldorf-Surheim, Germany.
“I thought, This is silly,” he says. “Why do we pay so much compared to the U.K.?”
A business was born in the answer to that question.
Photo by silver-john/ShutterStock.