At 09:03 PM 5/1/01 -0700, Chuck McManis wrote:
Don't be confused :-) This is exactly how a lot of
folks prefer it to work, you say to the list : "I've got a widget and its
available for sale, this it what I'd like for it." and you get either
"I'll take it.", "how about $y instead", or dead silence. In the
latter case then you can put it on Ebay in good conscience because no one can heckle you
after you offered it here first.
My good friend Sheldon (author of Mapping the Commodore 64 and
various ancient Atari reference guides) has another rule, that if you
put something on eBay and it doesn't sell, you can throw it away
(or donate it) in good conscience.
I'm still amazed and puzzled by eBay. Although you hear plenty
of griping about high prices, I'm still stunned by the deals that
people get. I recently sold an old (probably classic) ISA
8-port serial card. It went for $11, and by some coincidence,
the buyer was local, so he picked it up the same day.
He explained that the company that bought the company that made this
card still sells these old cards for $1700 or so, and he'd budgeted
up to $500 to acquire one, but he got it for $11 from me.
Where he works, they use these in the printing business to feed multiple
magazine addressing systems, and by cobbling them together themselves
with relatively classic components, they save tens of thousands
of dollars per system, compared with new equipment.
None of my very classic and rare (new) Amiga wearables went for
more than $12, and many went for less than half that.
- John