2010 Summer-Fall Issue | Archives | Blog

eBay and the Receding Bargain (Web Log 2 - 9/17/05)
By Bruce Hope

     eBay and the Receding Bargain
     
      On eBay, it's the phenomenon of The Receding Bargain. It goes along way to account for the success of eBay, and it is a form of insidious addiction.
     
      You do a search for, let's say, CD printers, and you find a couple hundred Epsons, R200s or R300s. This is the first wave, the first cheap home printers that print directly onto printable CDs. I had a friend who had a commercial unit that printed 30 or 40 an hour, but this was the first photo-quality, cheap-for-home-use, CD printers on the market.
     
      The first few days of the wave, you find many selling in the $70-80 range. Apparently, there are still people that don't do any research, because there are still some that believe the $199 retail price, and pay something like $149 or $129 for one from the first wave. A little Googling will tell you that they are $99 at Epson, and you can get a refurbished for $77 with free shipping.
     
      Since nearly everyone is a hyper-educated shopper these days, the printers are mostly selling in the $60-70 range after the first week or two of plucking the suckers (the over-eager and inexperienced buyers). After the first wave you see quite a few starting at 0.99, and the rest starting at $9.99 or $29.99 or whatever. With a product in such demand, there will be none that aren't bid up to the going rate, the mean level.
     
      So you add some to your watch list, leaving out sellers with no feedback, or poor feedback, and you start your vigil.
     
      You watch the progress day after day. You have quickly determined that the going rate for these on eBay is around $70 (including shipping), inching toward $60. Occasionally one sells for $57 or $58, so you're looking for the day when one goes for $50. So you will be there, with bells on. Even if all goes like magic, and you happen to be looking at just the right moment, and haven't found some other immediate need for that money, the best you can hope to accomplish is very little.
     
      And this is providing you can outlast your competitors. It takes considerable courage and stamina - not to give in to your desire to HAVE IT NOW! - to start printing on printable CDs! Oh, that will be such a welcome improvement over writing on them with Sharpies!
     
      You have spent hours and hours to save $20. Early on, you could have bought one for $70 and been done with it.
     
      Most of us can remember back - now gather 'round children - when a person occasionally slipped away from eBay with a real bargain. It seems like only yesterday, that a person could still have that garage-sale-going-to-Antiques-Roadshow feeling about a purchase on eBay. Those days are gone. And I am trying to accept that. Those days are gone.
     
      Ebay is now just one of the Big Box Stores.
     
      It's still a useful place to shop, and especially to comparison shop (is there any other kind of shopping any more I wonder?) - find out just exactly the lowest price going on any given item on any given day.
     
      And I'm still selling on eBay too, but every day I question the wisdom of that. The expenses for PayPal, eBay, USPS, FedEx, UPS, shipping supplies, and time spent - it's just plain bad business. But everybody has dreams of making money in their sleep, from their home, in the future.
     
      Always in the future.
     
      This is the House of the Rising Sun, that's "been the ruin of many a poor boy, and God, I know, I'm one."
     
     

On the blight of Wal-Mart (Web Log 1 - 9/15/05)
By Bruce Hope

     On the blight of Wal-Mart
     
      Talking with a new friend today, a caller in the McCook, Nebraska, area, ordering Golden Flax from the South Dakota Store, I was inspired to get on with BLOGGING. I've been meaning to post some comments on this site for some time. Thanks Bruce for your inspiration.
     
      We were talking about flax, and soon found ourselves sharing accounts of the devastation Wal-Mart is wreaking in America, and most visibly (to all but the blindest) in small-town America (i.e., the heartland, where we live).
     
      Bemoaning the fact that all blithe and ebullient (will all those savings, they should be ebullient, but they're not) shoppers - as they waddle and toddle and trundle off to their imagined savings, their always-the-low-price mentality, everyday low prices - they don't understand their complicity in the devastation.
     
      Note: If you haven't seen the PBS show on Wal-Mart - "Is Wal-Mart Good for America" -please get a copy of it immediately. And don't dismiss this because you've bought into some refusal to believe anything presented by "liberal" media. This kind of information is available from a wide variety of sources. One of the sadder stories in the program is about what Wal-Mart did to Rubbermaid. The company was an American success story, whose name was well-known and respected. It was a flagship product for all the department stores. Wal-Mart virtually destroyed the company by a series of forced price dips and other typically heavy-handed maneuvers.
     
      My friend from Nebraska talked about the way Wal-Mart's artificial low prices on high visibility items is meant to destroy competition. "Once the competition is gone," he says, "Wal-Mart gets really ugly." He went on to list a series of price hikes that took place after the local hardware store closed.
     
      He thinks Wal-Mart can still be beaten, but that it takes uncommon shrewdness and creativity. He wondered if we had DollarTree stores around here (we don't). They seem to successfully spring up in the shadows of Wal-Mart locations.
     
      And sometimes the answer is economic development at the county level, he said, noting that small town in his area took on the Big New Business idea that was supposed to bring development to the community, but all the new people/employees shop at a larger town nearby. If the county had shepherded the project, the revenue would be ending up in the right coffers.
     
      We talked about how the internet offered some opportunity for rural America, a level playing field for online sales - if there is anyone still in business - but the legislatures are trying to find the ways to tax that as well, which will end the profitability of internet sales for all but the deadly cutthroat Big Boxes. I am still hoping there is some relief in that arena, but it hasn't really materialized for most comunities yet.
     
      And he was not real hopeful about political solutions. George Bush's recent highway bill provided millions to Wal-Mart for the purpose of creating an exclusive interstate exit in Alabama, I believe it was (if anyone knows the particulars, I'd appreciate an email). The bill provides for the diversion of another interstate highway for Donald Trump.
     
      So we are not only up against all the power in high places, but moreso the ignorance and apathy of our fellow Americans. Wow.