[AMRadio] trades, sales, auctions, even wanted

[Todd, KA1KAQ]

On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 5:00 PM, W5AMI <ars.w5ami at gmail.com> wrote:


> I have used eBay, and still do from time to time.  I guess we feel "close
> knit" here and trust one another, and hope that an item such as that would
> be offered to the members before it's brought to the public and some
> collector that might want it who will never even use it.  I don't know...
>

Pretty much how I feel, Brian. The main issues at play for me are:

- many if not most of us use and/or are capable of searching ebay, and do
so regularly

- eBay makes billions of dollars and doesn't give any of it to this list
for advertising

- you(as a seller) are willing to use the list to point us to an auction
which we're all quite capable of finding, but not willing to offer the item
for sale to anyone here. You're saying 'sure, you can buy it - but only if
you're willing to pay more than anyone else'. That says a lot to me about
someone who's supposedly a member of a group.

Like Brian and many others, I use eBay. It's great for finding stuff,
definitely a tool worth having in the toolbox. I still buy occasionally but
stopped selling there some time ago when fees became too numerous and
ridiculous. Always sold without issue, even without posting my auctions on
other lists or sites as free ads. I'm not sure how a seller could feel
safer selling me something through an auction site where I could
potentially leave them bad feedback and they cannot do the same to me, over
selling to me directly on a list. You can get hosed just as easily on ebay
and still be out the item, money, whatever else. More often than not it's
an issue of wanting to get top dollar. Nothing wrong with that, eBay is
well suited to this need.

It's not an issue of auctions being terrible anymore than it's an issue of
'safety', IMO. It's just another venue that doesn't mix terribly well with
lists where opinions as well as freeloaders (those who contribute nothing
to the list but will join as a means of posting free ads that benefit them)
inevitably send things in the wrong direction. The benefit of
one-stop-shopping isn't worth the hassle to me. My recollection is that it
was actually allowed briefly back in the 90s but turned into a mess
quickly.

Back to the mowing. Only an acre or so to go!

~ Todd,  KA1KAQ/4