[Milsurplus] Golden years of collecting?

[Peter Gottlieb]

I got into selling a bunch of stuff on ebay at a couple of points.  Did 
the whole deal, boxes, good packing, decent photos, honest descriptions 
and no "taken from a working environment" (hmmm, my environment seems to 
be working...) kind of nonsense.

Many people complained about the shipping cost (I did not live by any 
companies so had to buy at Staples), even though I was losing money.  
The UPS calculator was always off, and not in my favor (I think they 
added other charges, like residential, after calculating).  Ebay and 
Paypal took their cuts.

In the end, only expensive items were worth the effort.  $10, $20, even 
$50 and $100 items were just not worth the overall time I spent on 
them.  I had a lot of military gear (non-radio, but electronic) and 
found that I could get more from disassembling and bringing the chassis 
to the scrap yard.  Then I also got to keep the components!  For other 
items I sure had better things to do than essentially work for less than 
minimum wage to get them sold and shipped. 

At this point I canabalize or give away much more than I sell on ebay.

About shipping costs.  It is the nature of companies to charge what they 
can get away with.  If profit is smelled in an area like servicing ebay 
sales, they will go after it.  Yes, it is great the services are 
available, and I am truly thankful for that, but I think you will see 
prices keep rising for individuals and small businesses.  You also may 
not know that corporations pay less than you or I do to ship things.  
There is always a significant discount.  I asked a business development 
guy from UPS why even local shipping was so expensive and he said, rates 
are uniform, and the dense areas (like the Northeast I am in) are indeed 
inexpensive and thus overpriced, but in sparce rural areas with 
infrequent deliveries it is actually grossly expensive to deliver a 
single package.  So I suppose it is a kind of subsidy the denser states 
pay to allow underpriced delivery to the open land states.

The lack of choice disturbs me.  Why isn't there a depot-to-depot 
service available that is much cheaper?  I deliver a carload of boxes to 
a major UPS/Fedex/whatever depot and each one makes it only to their 
depot in whatever major city is near the destination.  This eliminates 
all local pickup and delivery, which is a large portion of their costs.  
This would be great for heavy boatanchor thyes of equipment!  Also, it 
would reduce the amount of handling and thus chances for damage.

Myself, although I do pick up an occassional gem on ebay, am going to 
try to get to more hamfests this year.

Peter


Michael Bittner wrote:
> As an occasional seller and a more frequent buyer on eBay, these are my 
> comments:
>
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