[NJARC] Hamfest April 20

[Dave Sica]

On Thu, 3 Apr 2008 11:29:47 -0700 (PDT) John Ruccolo <jr6v6gt at yahoo.com>
writes:
> Hamfests are still good, and they're still fun. But
> they are not -- and never will be -- what they were
> pre-Internet, and especially pre-Ebay. That's just
> life.

Don't write hamfests off too quickly (or NJARC swapmeets for that
matter!) I've so far managed to stay away from the increasingly popular
sport of "eBay hating" but I got sucker punched the other day and I'm
willing to predict that eBay, like the railroads, AT&T and General
Motors, will see the end of it's day of being the 500 pound gorilla. In
any case, they've made it pretty clear that casual hobby sellers are no
longer all that welcome.

Check out their new "star" rating system. I predict that this is going to
cause a lot of ill will. It's not obvious at first glance, but it turns
out that having a buyer rate you anything less than 5 out of 5 stars CAN
mean you're a bum according to their system. I have almost perfect,
blatantly obvious above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty positive feedback yet
I turned into a bum earlier this week and found myself locked out of a
sale, all because of an apparently erroneous, not-appealable-or-fixable,
less than perfect star rating from a happy customer. Since I now have a
"bad" star rating (under 4.5 out of 5 in any one of four categories means
you are no longer good), I'm frozen out of all the special deals eBay
occasionally offers. Dead in the water and they couldn't even bother to
answer my email about it.  THAT never happened to me at a  hamfest!

--Dave