Amos describes merchants impatient for religious days to end so they can sell, and he lists cheating practices like making the ephah small and the shekel great. He also says they buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals. See Amos 8:4–6.
In Amos 8:4–6 the prophet calls out business people who target the vulnerable while pretending to respect holy days. They impatiently wait for worship times to end so they can reopen trade, then use rigged measures and dishonest scales to overcharge customers. This paragraph sits inside Amos’s later series of warnings and visions where the prophet presses Israel to see that public religion does not cancel everyday exploitation.
Amos 8:4–6 presents a blunt accusation: some merchants are crushing the vulnerable while keeping up the appearance of honoring sacred times. The text depicts people who “swallow up” the needy and make the poor “fail,” then speaks in their own imagined words as they impatiently wait for the new moon and the Sabbath to be over so selling can resume.
A careful answer keeps the immediate passage, the book's argument, and the whole-Bible storyline together, so the question is answered in context instead of as a detached idea.
Start with Amos 8:4-6, then read the surrounding section so the answer stays connected to the passage's flow.
4Hear this, you who would swallow up the needy, and cause the poor of the land to fail,
5saying, When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell grain? and the Sabbath, that we may set forth wheat, making the ephah small, and the shekel great, and dealing falsely with balances of deceit;
6that we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes, and sell the refuse of the wheat?