eBay madness

On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 10:20:50 -0400, Roger Merchberger <zmerch(a)30below.com> wrote: While you are correct in that assumption, there are many ways to find stuff. For example: the last city I lived in had a buy/sell paper, and people from surrounding communities would pick it up (or, more recently, get it online). That expanded the radius to a 100 km or so. For one particularly hard to find item, I had a buyer who was willing to drive 300 km to pick it up. Even so, my problem isn't so much with buying/swapping stuff online as it is about eBay-like institutions. eBay is a culture without a community. That is to say that you have buyers and you have sellers and you have an established set of behaviours, but there is very little social interaction. When you go into a small shop, you get to know people and they get to know you and you talk. When you buy things off a mailing list or usenet or web forums, there is a "shop" (so to speak) for people to meet. Buying or selling on eBay seems to parallel buying stuff from a department store. You end up with salesmen who may or may not know a thing about what they are selling. Either way, their job rarely involves the customer. Either way, you and the people around you are trying to get in and out as quickly as possible. Which may be why I avoid that type of store in every day life.