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.

Shipping rates have gotten completely out of fucking control. It's gone beyond ridiculous and jumped right to pissing me off. I'm right in the midst of placing my order for True Dungeon treasure tokens and was searching around online for plastic pages in which I can store them when they arrive. Since the tokens are supposed to be Clout-esque, and perhaps even made by the safe manufacturer, I went searching for plastic pages that would fit Clout chips.

It wasn't exactly easy to track down online stores that had the items avaliable. I can only assume that Clout is still failing to get significant market penetration. In fact, I could only find a couple of web retailers that even carried the items I needed. The refill pages are sold in bundles of 10, each capable of holding 20 chips, and retailed for $4. Most of the stores I saw were knocking around a dollar off of that and I was planning to pick up four bundles. Imagine my surprise when my $12 order racked up shipping charges ranging anywhere from $7.50 to $11.00. Basically, the shipping costs would be 40-50% of the total purchase price. It's not exactly like I was asking them to beam the pages to me overnight either. The $11 option was actually for USPS parcel post if you can fucking believe it. Next day air would actually set a person back $32. Based on these prices you would think I must be trying to get them to ship a 10 pound rock cross-country rather than 40 sheets of thin plastic pages.

Now, I know that shipping costs have gone up in recent years but this is just fucking ridiculous. It's almost bad enough at this point that it's probably cheaper just to find a retail store nearby. Well, that is if there was a retail store nearby and they actually carried Clout. Paying retail and sales tax is actually cheaper than ordering the crap online.

If anyone out there has any suggestions for online stores that don't gouge on shipping and carry chip pages, let me know. I'm pretty damn disgruntled at the moment.