I feel, as the British say, like a tit for posting the above but someone did make the nice icon and I figured, what the hell. I'm sure most of you have no clue what it means, no should you. It's just a discworld reference and only comprehended by those who have delved a little too deep into the pit that's known as fandom.

A lot of the people on a discworld community I watch went one step further and were all agog over a commemorative pin put out just for this occasion with the proceeds to go to Alzheimer's research. Now, I love the discworld novels as much as the next person, but I just can't see spending 50 dollars to buy something that I know I would never wear and even if I did, no one would get. I imagine there must be more Pratchett fans in the UK so if you picked up something like this you could at least exchange knowing smiles with people on the street and the occasional enthusiastic high-5. After all, what's the point of sending out a message that no one will ever receive and understand. It's like throwing a party for 1 in your closet.

Anyway, for those of you who are discworld fans, happy lilac day. For those of you that aren't, you probably weren't missing anything all that interesting anyway. It also just happens to be mock26's birthday. I should try to remind myself to give him a call sometime today.

It's just about time that I should set off to the Bill's for their memorial day party. I'm thinking about stopping at some stores on the way there. There are some pretty unbelievable deals on video games that start today and if I could actually find any in stock, I could easily flip them on ebay for some small amount of filthy lucre.

So, another happy sort of event happened to me today. They're rare enough that I feel the need to document them no matter how banal. In this case, it has to do with USPS and shipping costs. I only just discovered that you can print out your own shipping labels and that it costs less than going to the post office. I always knew that something like this was possible but back in the day, they required you to rent one of those little printout machines and pay a monthly fee. It was only worthwhile for people who were shipping dozens of items a week. At some point in time they must've realized that was a shitty idea and switched over to letting people print them out of any regular printer. It's amazing.

The savings aren't huge or anything but the key is that the delivery confirmation is free. I've been paying 60-70 cents for that on every package I've sent out through ebay. Add the small discount for buying postage online and I save around a buck or so per item. That might not seem like much but margins are pretty tight whenever I sell things. I finally worked out the math and the profit on the Petunia Pickle Bottom bags were less than what I had hoped after ebay/paypal fees were taken out. Fully a quarter of the profit was taken up by those fees. No wonder the only people to survive selling on ebay are those who sell in bulk. You're nickel and dimed to death and the only way to maintain a fair profit is to up the number of transactions.

Oh well. A penny saved is a penny earned.

So far, 6 of the PPB bags have sold to my surprise. One of the people who purchased one doesn't want to pay for it, but that's pretty much par for the course. She claims she's too stupid to work the checkout feature and just wants to call the whole thing off. I can sort of understand if these were auctions and you popped up a bid early on that ended up winning but these were all buy it now listing. I mean, look at the name. Buy it now. Not say you want it then end up changing your mind.

I offered to help her through the checkout process but I'm sure it's a non-starter. She might be dumb as a brick but even most idiots can figure out how to pay for something online. I figure it's just an excuse and the lack of response since the initial email reinforces that idea. I have her home address and phone # so I might just give her a ring in a day or two and see if I can compel payment.

No love yet for the leftover VB's. Maybe it's just a case of what's hot today is tommorrow's rubbish.

Connie is once again passing me more girly stuff to sell on eBay. I never even finished getting rid of all of those Vera Bradley bags from last time. There are still a couple left that no one ended up buying. This time around I'm hawking something called 'Petunia Pickle Bottom'. When I first heard the name I thought for sure it must have something to do with the Rugrats. Instead, it turns out to be another one of those status symbol items that cost and arm and a leg and no normal person should be willing to pay for. Most of these bags are hideously ugly in my opinion, but the fact that they're status symbols seem to blind people. Take a look for yourself if you don't believe me. Most of them look like something an old woman would upholster her couch with.

I just don't get women and their endless array of purses and crap. I can only imagine that it's one of those Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus scenarios. How can you even be sure that others will recognize what you're carrying as being something of value rather than what a blind person picked out from good will? Are women trained to recognize the difference at a distance and then appropriately ooze envy or something?

This whole thing reminds me of a conversation I had ages ago about shoes. Most women I've known have dozens of pairs of the dratted things and the explaination is always that only certain shoes can go with certain outfits and so on. I've not sure I've ever intentionally looked at someone's feet to check out their footgear in my entire life. It would take a massive amount of disconnect, like wearing army boots with a prom dress, for me to take note of it. I'd like to believe that most men are the same way so the only reason to do all this is to impress other women. Why the heck would you even want to bother? Well, unless you're a lesbian or something. There just doesn't seem to be much point to it.

Oh well. I guess the upshot is that I don't really have to understand it. I just have to hope that women remain insane enough to buy this crap until I can clear my inventory. One of them already sold last night.

I have got to get off my ass and offload what's left of the crap I have from Kingdom of Loathing. I tried to logon tonight and spent around 30 panicy minutes as I couldn't get the password right for the main account with all the stuff. I thought the damn thing had been deleted and all the crap was gone. It wasn't until multiple searches through other accounts unveiled the fact that I had misremembered my freaking login the entire time.

It's not exactly a trivial point either. If I took the time to liquidate the damn items, we're talking about at least a thousand dollars in the end if current ebay prices are any judge. Then there are a few items so weirdly rare that I'm not even sure I can manage to sell the things for anything near its list price. There was a 1 day item ages back called the Emo Roe. Current listings on the game have it priced at 440 mil. 10 million meat is around $20, so if it sold for that price you could convert it to around $800. I've got 3 of them. It all comes down to whether it would sell, of course, but even if I could only get half, that's still an insane amount of money.

I have got to liquidate this before I end up fucking it up.

I'm not online all that often of late. I just can't sit at the computer for long periods and it had me thinking again about maybe buying a laptop. The only problem is I'm sure to suffer buyer's remorse the minute I pick one up. It seems sort of ridiculous to get a laptop for the sole reason of using it to make LJ entries and follow a few forums, right? It might just be best to twiddle my thumbs and wait until someone I know wants to upgrade their laptop and pick up their old one. It's not like it has to be top of the line, or even close to it. All it has to do is be able to run some basic programs and have a wireless setup.

Lets see, other than the whole internal laptop debate, I've been selling a few things online. I'm back to peddling those wedding coasters to girly bride forums. I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but one of my sisters came up with the idea when she was prepping for her wedding and I got tapped to carry it on. It's pretty profitable overall, but I've tended to run hot and cold on the whole thing. For one, I refuse to make posts on the wedding forums, feeling completely out of my depth there. That means I basically have to wait for my sister to make an entry and then I end up fielding emails and filling orders, pretending I'm her.





So those are the coasters and I've been selling them in lots of 100. It always amazes me just how gungho and nitpicky some brides are when it comes to their weddings. I sometimes feel like I'm involved in some sort of demented RPG when selling coasters. It's just another world where I have to be bright and chipper and chitchat. No wonder I can only handle it for limited periods of time.

Oh, I also bought 14 copies of the Lego Advent Calender for a pretty good price. I should be able to flip them on eBay for a bit more than double what I payed.

Well, it looks like flipping all those Wii's ended up pushing my ebay sales to a point where they just made me a powerseller. When I first saw the email inviting me to join, I thought for sure it was just phishing spam that gmail failed to weed out. God knows that I had gotten tons of fake emails purporting to offer the exact same thing before. Frankly, I don't see exactly what the big deal is. I get that little icon-whozit next to my userid but there dosen't seem to be much else to it. Besides, it's not like I'm going to have it long enough for it to really matter. Even at the lowest level of this thing you have to sell over $1,000 worth of crap a month, and there's no way I'm going to get close to that again. So soon I'll again join the ranks of the schlubs, occassionally pawning off crap I no longer need to people who value crap. I'm always amazed there are people who make a career out of ebay. It just seems like it'd be an endless pile of irritation. Everything from finding packing materials to dealing with what goes where. I guess it's not that bad if you're systematic and organized about it, but dealing with those Wii's was a monumental pain in the ass at times.

Yay! One of the side-advantages of flipping those Wii's on ebay just arrived today. Since I used the Amazon Visa to make the purchased, I accumilated a hell of a lot of points redeamable for gift certificates. All in all, I've picked up $50 with some points left over to boot. Not a bad bonus considering how often I make purchases from amazon.

In a similar vein, I was over browsing The Consumerist site and ran across a blog which tracked the Wii prices on eBay over the past couple of months. The methodology is a wee bit suspect since he didn't seperate out bundles from just the consoles, but it does give you a short of idea about the fluxuations.



I might not be completely happy about how I made out, but a profit is a profit, right? I never did get around to tallying it all up but it wasn't insignificant.

It looks like my joy over the Senseo might have been a bit pre-mature. I was so happy that someone, anyone, bid on the thing so I could get it out of my room. If no one wanted it, I would have been more than satisfied just to chuck it out a window. So when it finally sold for a little over $15 (with $20 shipping) it was happy days. Right up to the point where the person hasn't payed for two days now and a search through their bidding history shows they won two senseos in the past few days. Feh. The moron probably overbid and is now trying to weasel out of paying. I keep sending invoices but there's been no response. It looks like I'm never going to get this piece of crap out of here.

It's actually been a pretty productive day for me so far. Of course, that's productive based on my standards which are admittedly quite low. eBay is having a $.10 listing sale today so I took the oppertunity to pop up some items. First and foremost, I relisted the 6 Vera Bradley bags that didn't sell the last time and then tossed in a couple of items that have been useless and taking up space. I'm not really expecting to get much, if anything, but at 10 cents a pop, it's not like it's really costing me anything to give the wheel a spin.

My room is full of clutter and crap that I should offload, but I just never get around to it because it never really occurs to me. From where I'm sitting, I can see things like a 550 piece little mermaid jigsaw puzzle painted by Christian Reese Lassen, bunches of unopened board/card games, dozens of old video games and dvds, etc. All sorts of things I no longer want and should just clear out. Maybe what I'll do is just pick a day and take pictures of all the items and wait until eBay is having another sale and pop it all up there. That's pretty much the deal with the senseo, though I actually took the pictures of the damn thing over half a year ago.

Oh, I also just downloaded the Stargate SG1 movie, Ark of Truth. Talk about a fubar of monumental proportions. I have no idea who over at MGM dropped the ball but letting a screener leak out over 2 months before your DVD's release is a huge fuckup. Since fans can't buy it in stores yet, they're almost forced to pirate it. For each one that does, a certain percentage won't go on to buy the item when it comes out in March. I'd be shocked if it didn't negatively affect sales. I feel a little guilty about the whole thing too, but at least it was never a certainty I was going to buy the dvd anyway. I haven't bought a dvd in years and I almost never watched them when I did pick one up. I'd like to support the franchise and all but just can't convince myself to spend the money.

Oh well. I'm off to watch the film.

I just got a response back from the whiny cunt. I thought I'd continue to share the exchange for the entertainment value if nothing else. Here's what he wrote:

from Kevin Grilliot <mwcs@bright.net> to Me
date Dec 16, 2007 11:27 AM
subject Re: You've received an answer to your question about item NIB Nintendo Wii Console + 14 Games +Super Mario Galaxy

I am requesting a partial refund of my shipping amout. Based on the amount you charged versus the amount of actual shipping costs, and the fact that you listed no packaging fees, you are in violation of ebay's shipping charges policy by charging me double what the actual shipping charges were. I have sold many items, and I found it works best to not list a shipping amount, and provide shipping quotes to the buyers. Shipping is not supposed to be a method of profit for the seller. I am an honest buyer and seller, and you should be too. Your response to my last email was inapropriate and uncalled for.

He then stuck at the bottom of this a copy of the ebay policy against excessive shipping. I basically told him he could take his request and go fuck himself. But nicely. Well, sorta nicely.

Me to Whiny Cunt:

Complain to ebay all you want. I will simply provide them receipts showing that I payed up to $35 shipping the exact same item to other individuals as well as proof from USPS that if if I had to ship to california or other western states, the cost would have been even higher than what I had charged. See if they can then teach you the meaning of the words 'flat shipping'. If you don't want your item, send it back to me in the condition in which it was received and I'll refund your money.

Maybe I was wrong and Wii-selling was more entertaining than I had given it credit for. It's always interesting to engage in a slapfight with a real asshat.

Man, selling those Wii's on eBay has been the gift that keeps on giving. Earlier today I got a message from someone who had purchased one last sunday and was wondering where it was. I sent him a response telling him that his item had been sent by USPS priority mail, and that according to the delivery confirmation number, it had been delivered earlier in the day. I got the following in response:

from Kevin Grilliot <mwcs@bright.net> to Me
date Dec 15, 2007 11:49 PM
subject Re: You've received an answer to your question about item NIB Nintendo Wii Console + 14 Games +Super Mario Galaxy

you mean to tell me you racked me $40 for shipping and just stuck it in the mail. What'd that run ya, ten bucks. rip off

I just jotted off a response that I'll reproduce here verbatim:

According to my receipt, it ran over $20 after the cost of insurance. I also realize that in your self-obsessed delusion, you might have failed to realize that shipping costs may be greater for other parts of the country farther apart than Ohio and New Jersey. While it cost me $20 to ship your package, I've payed over $35 to ship the same exact item to other locations. It was flat shipping, you knew that going in, and you got what you payed for.

About all I did manage to self-censor was the final sentence concluding he was an asshole. So, what do you think? Should I write a book on how to ebay or what? I can title it, How to Win Friends and Positive Feedback.

Seriously though, what a whiny cunt. Overall, I was just lucky I didn't end up having any people purchase from California, Hawaii, or Alaska. I'm sure that would have pushed the total cost of shipping over the rate I charged. As it was, getting out to some parts of the country already came pretty darn close. Since the USPS changed their entire shipping cost system to take distance into consideration, it's become another level of gambling uncertainty as far as selling crap on ebay. The difference can often be stark. Sending to people a state or two away only ended up costing around $15 and change, less than half as much as freighting it out to the hinterlands. I'm sure it all averages out in the long haul, but for most of us small and infrequent sellers, it can have a huge impact on profit margin.

I'm currently selling a bunch of Vera Bradley bags that my sister, Connie, picked up through some online sale. She got around 20 of them for around 60% off all told. She had no intention of keeping them all and so it automaticly became my job to take pictures of these ugly things and put them up for sale. I'm not exagerating either when I affix the ugly label to these bags. Take a look for yourself. The fabric is quilt-like and the pattern resembles something that someone's little old grandmother would have for their living room upholstery. My sister assures me that they are all the rage, however, and I can only conclude she must be right because the damn things have actually been selling. I listed a total of 17 of them a couple of days ago and 6 have already sold. There's simply no accounting for taste if you ask me. On the offchance you too are one of the masses with dubious taste and want one of these ugly bags for yourself, let me know and I can kill the auction and pass on the reduction in ebay and paypal fees.

On a sidenote, I made a new LJ icon which I figured fit this entry pretty well.

Welp, I sold the extra Western Digital My Book on ebay. I listed it with a BIN price of $114.95 which might have been a bit low given the fact that someone snapped it up within a couple of hours. It's always hard to know exactly where to set your prices for things like that and I've had enough of auctions for the time being. The whole uncertainty of it all is driving me bonkers. I might have ended up earning an additional $10 or so by putting it up for auction but this ends up saving me a bit of stress and since I can mail it tommorrow when some of the Wii's go out, also saves me another trip to the post office. That's worth at least a few dollars right off the bat.

Anyway, the $20 I charged for shipping should come close to covering both fees and the actual shipping costs so things are pretty copacetic on that front. No muss and no fuss.

As for the Wii's, I still haven't received payment on one of the auctions and it's starting to grate on my nerves. WTF is with some people and their inability to pay promptly? It's ecspecially irksome since they got a pretty good price for the bundle, certainly far than a good chunk of the other auctions I've seen. You'd think they'd happily pay up just in the hopes that I don't end up changing my mind about selling it to them and wanting to receive it by Christmas.

I also got an email off of Craig's List the other day. It had purportedly been from someone inquiring about the Wii's. Since I had listed a pretty high price there and added to the issues with the person who hadn't payed yet, I was more than happy to entertain the idea of selling it locally instead. I sent back a quick message that stated the bundle was still avaliable and that I was willing to meet at some 3rd party location in order to swap it for cash on delivery. Today I received the following email in response.

> Hello ,
I received your email regarding the enquariy. If you
want to sell it now im willing to offer $580.I can
pay you right now with a USPS POSTAL MONEY ORDER ,I
won't be able to come look at it,due to the nature
of my profession, and there short notice traveling
jobs, I had to leave town and will be back in a week
or two so i'll forward your details to my client to
make the my payment payable to you in order not to
delay. Can i have your contact info with phone
number to proceed with payment.It will be sent to
you via UPS courier.It will be picked up by the
freight forwarding company as soon as you confirm
cleared funds and all documents will be signed by
them.

Thanks
Scott

Fucking scaming assholes. Here's a clue, asshat, get someone who actually speaks and writes English fluently to draft these ridiculous messages for you and maybe you shouldn't offer to pay more than I was actually requesting.

At this point, I'm thinking seriously of stringing this jackass along for a while and seeing how things turn out. If nothing else, I've never seen a fake USPS money order before and that might be sorta spiffy. Of course, I'm sure things will get far more convoluted almost immediately.

Alrighty, lets put it to the masses:

Poll #1100175
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Should I respond to the scammer and play along just to see what happens?

If 'Other', please elaborate:

Poll ends Wednesday morning, at which point I will either respond to the email or chuck it into the trash.

Update: Looks like the vote is 'No' by a 5 to 4 margin with most people feeling it's unwise to dick around with Nigerian nutjobs who have your home address. All this does is remind me that I should go out and buy myself a shotgun or something.

Well, it wasn't all that I hoped for in the end but it ended up being respectable. I had been hoping to reach a $200 profit per auction and I think it's clear I missed that by a good chunk. The final price ended up ranging from $477 to $510. Add another $30 for shipping and insurance and we're looking at $507 to $540. It's around $17 for ebay fees, $15 for paypal fees, $7 for insurance fees, $15 (guesstimate) for shipping, for a net of $450 to $486. Subtract the cost of the console itself along with the Wii Play and Numchuks and we're looking at....around $150 worth of profit per auction.

I guess it's not bad but I can't help but feeling a little disapointed. It's hard not to when you see some of the ridiculous prices some of the other auctions got.

Welp, 9 hours left to go and bids are slowly creeping upwards. I trekked out today into the middle of the blasted snow to get to Toys R Us right when it opened. Choosing to wear a pair of sandals out into the snow was definitely a mistake. The reason for the journey was that they were offering a sale where if you bought Super Mario Galaxy, any other Wii game would be 50% off. I ended up picking up 3 SMG's and 3 copies of Wii Play. That gives me a total of 4 copies of SMG which I can bundle with the four remaining Wii's I haven't listed on ebay yet, and I can return 3 of the Wii Plays I bought at full price to Amazon. To make it better, I had a $10 off coupon that I was able to use and $50 worth of gift cards from the previous SMG promotion.

On a sidenote, I know most of you don't fucking care about what I'm selling on ebay, much less what I'm actually getting for it. For the most part, this is your own fucking fault anyway. I ran a poll a while back asking people what sort of content they generally wanted to see and a majority of individuals poorly chose to have more personal entries. You poor fools. This is the sort of claptrap around which my life revolves at the moment. If you were smart, you would have chosen to have more Satanic Cat Watches or the like.

Hmmm, speaking of other content. I'm sort of curious about what's become of CBG. She hasn't made a new entry in ages and thus, I haven't had my regular dose of spazzertainment. I hope she hasn't gone and killed herself or something. I guess I could go and try to search out a replacement but I'm not sure I want to wade through all of the emo crap in LJ-land. If anyone has any suggestions of someone deserving to be a CBG replacement, let me know.

Yay! Most of my Wii's are selling on ebay for $0.99. Hot damn, I'm rich now. It's still early but it's always a pain to watch the items just sit there at values like that and just know that you have rows and rows of vulture bidders sitting and waiting. I wish more of them would just make a bid already so I can at least establish a basement price. Everything's scheduled to end on Sunday and I'm starting to feel a little antsy. It seems pretty clear that prices are starting to dip from the sheer spike in supply. The average price for what I'm selling still looks pretty good, but the minimums are starting to enter a scary sort of territory.

I picked up each Wii for $250 and I've added on another $70 worth of games and components, bringing the base cost to $320. The price on ebay seems to be averaging around $550 at the moment, but it's gotten as low as $450. I was really hoping to be able to make a net of $200 per console and that's going to be in jeopardy if the price continues to slide. The odd part is the price for just the console is actually rising a bit. It's now at least 50 dollars higher on average than it was when I checked around a week ago. The whole point to buy and add the extras is it made for a better profit margin. That margin is now shrinking and I'm just worried it'll reverse.

Feh. I'm probably fretting over nothing here. It's going to end up as it ends up and there's notta I can do to make it better at this point. The thing that makes it more annoying is that Amazon is welshing on their product description. That's why I had to go out and buy the $70 worth of additional crap in the first place. The extras weren't included in the package and they seem to have no intention of hororing what their webpage said I would be receiving. I filed a dispute for $70 x 3 with the credit card company but who knows how that will pan out. If I end up winning or Amazon decides to come through in the end, I can stop worrying about this whole mess. No matter how the bidding goes on eBay, I'll have made what I wanted to at a minimum.

I'm starting to think that I should just camp out at the store. It might save me some gas and they're nice and air conditioned. By that, I'm sure you can guess where I went today. I ended up snatching up more games, this time with the hopes of reselling them on ebay and half.com. I'm not sure that the profit margin will be huge, but I should make at the very minimum around $5 per item and I picked up 7. While $35 dosen't seem worth the effort I've gone through, that's just the lowest possible amount of profit. I figure it could go as high as 2 to 2 and a half times that and it's practically found money. I had wanted to go anyway to pick up a couple other discounted items only avaliable starting today so why the heck not. If anyone actually wants to buy a copy of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, let me know :P.

I had 13 DS games at the start of last week. 7 days later my collection has ballooned up to 23, though not all are in hand yet, and might yet grow. God only knows how much time I'm going to sink into it once the initial afterglow of ownership passes.

Another $120 dollars from meat sales on eBay. I dropped the prices a bit to make sure that the lots sell out fast and it's working well. Less than 12 hours and poof, all gone. For every $120 I make, I'm losing around $10 from the price drop, but I figure that's worth it just to not have to deal with the hassle of possibly getting my account suspended or terminated. It's amazing how much people are willing to pay for some of the geegaws on the game. If there weren't such risk involved now, I'm sure I could squeeze out quite a bit more just from selling items in addition to currency. However, since I can't estimate demand all that well, it would be a risk to pop something up there that might never clear.

Other than that, I've been watching/listening to day 2 of Nifong's trial. It's alternatingly interesting and tedious. What does seem clear after one and a half days of testimony is that Nifong is pretty screwed. It's been established pretty clearly that he knew the case was weak as hell from the beginning and that he made not only inflammatory statements to the media but outright false ones. Add to that the info that just came out today that he knew there were multiple male DNA sources on Crystal and that none of them matched any LAX player _BEFORE_ he sought indictments, and I figure his goose is cooked. All that's left is seeing what the punishment is. It's too bad we don't crucify people anymore. I think it might be educational to have Nifong nailed to a cross in front of Durham's town hall.