Understanding Ebay shopping

You can buy anything on Ebay--the great bazaar in the sky, or more precisely in cyberspace which realm equates to heaven in many minds. I guess the operative assumption of online auctions is that someone somewhere will buy something, anything, sight unseen at that; and I am here to prove it since I myself and an Ebay shopper. More about that later.

The need to shop online ensues from the condition of living in a small town in the outback. That is how it begins anyway. Then after that it becomes a quest to see whether you can ever be the last bidder and win an item that many other people want. I usually only win when I am the only one bidding. And I still lose sometimes. I lost a hairdryer hanging rack when I was sure I was the only one in the world who wanted one.

Since the quantity of items for sale on Ebay is roughly comparable to the amount of the national debt, I thought I could help you make some sense of it all by categorizing some of those things for you. I know Ebay has it’s own system—a list of items you can click on, such as electronics, guns, cameras, etc. My list is a bit more to the point of your sensibilities.

First there are the nothing-for-something deals. You can buy a quart jar of Ozark air, a snowball from the Colorado Rockies, and a square inch of real estate in Hawaii. You will be happy to know that you can also buy a insulting email delivered direct to your inbox. I am wondering why anyone would pay for one of those. I always thought they came free. Isn’t that sort of like spending good money for houseflies?
Second, there is the unique/antique (anything old or scarce) market. I saw an 1850s prosthetic leg made of wood and steel for sale the other day. (I didn’t just type in prosthetic leg and up it came. I was looking for my special kind of socks.) Just so you know, you can’t sell any human remains on Ebay. Prosthetics are okay though.

Then thirdly, there is the collector’s exchange. You might find the last penny for your set of consecutive pennies from 1900 to present on Ebay. One seller found a penny on the ground and with his sales earnings was able to buy a VW bus and drive all the way from wherever to the Jay Leno show. Wow!

Next there is a category I have named the holy food group. You might want to watch your potato chips, cereal, and pretzels more carefully. You may have already eaten a trip to Disneyland or something. There is a current Ebay sale of a pretzel shaped like Mary holding Baby Jesus which last time I checked had a high bid of $3,150. Yes, dollars. Incidentally, someone had contacted the seller to see how many salt crystals were baked on the pretzel since that number might be significant of something—I can’t think what.

Then there is the hard-to-find division. It includes some of those things that are useful but uncommon. I am not an electronic geek by any means, but even I can tell when my old phone charger won’t charge my new phone because the little plug-in thing is the wrong size. Buying a new charger is sometimes impossible, as well as expensive. Where is the government electronics recycle agency when I need it? Well Ebay is it, only free-market capitalism created it. For $2.10 I found on Ebay an adapter the size of a half a pencil that made me the proud owner of a phone charger that I can use and which I might otherwise have had to sell on Ebay.

Finally, there is the you-are-about-to-be-had category which is similar to the first one, only in number one, you are about to be had and you know about it. One of the first things I ever bought on Ebay was a used (red flag) overedge hemmer. Well, it’s a sewing machine, and it could belong to the hard-to-find category, except that about-to-be-had takes precedence.

Well, the used overedge hemmer might have hemmed when the seller shipped it, but there was not a chance that it could by the time I got it. As you know, sewing machines are not round like a ball nor soft like a pillow. You would not play catch with one nor sleep on it. They have spindles, hinges, corners and edges, moistly made of metal or hard plastic.

My machine came shipped in an oversized cardboard box into which it and its parts had been dumped with not even a square of bubble wrap or a piece of popcorn or newspaper for padding. What I got was a Swiss cheese box and the proverbial bucket of bolts but only the pieces that were too big to fall through the holes. To add to the pain, the operating instructions were written in Chinese and the pictures were drawn in Swahili.