eBay fun

I mentioned eBay the other week, but I thought I'd do a separate blood about their latest scam - the racket that is e-bay appears to have come up with yet another way to rip everyone off.

They've now started charging for postage.  Yes, that's right, if you enter the correct amount of postage on your item, you're now going to be 10% worse off.  Well done you cunts.

They've stated some bullshit about this being to "encourage people to offer free postage" and to "provide better value for buyers".

Now don't get me wrong - there is a giant loophole in the system as was.  If you selected "other courier" then it allows you to enter whatever value you want.  And of course, auctions up to 99p are free, so by putting 99p and then, say, £30 for postage, you could sell quite expensive items and not pay e-bay a penny.

Of course, this is playing the system, and it was something I never engaged in.  Indeed, until Royal Mails more recent price hikes, I was relatively happy to charge less for postage than it actually cost me.

For cheaper items (genuine 99p, not worth much, just want to get rid of it but don't want to throw it away type ones) I would try to get roughly the right postage, but didn't factor in cost of envelope and all that.  I didn't mind too much as 99p auctions are free to list (well, you can do 100 a month free) and then they charge 10% (10p) at the end and PayPal take 4%+20p (25p-ish), so the postage was made up by what was left.

But now let's look at the economics.  The 35p it costs on the item is still the same, but you now pay 10% of postage.  Well, for one of the White Dwarf magazines I've been selling recently, for example, the postage is a staggering £1.40.  So if you put £1.40, you're now effectively being charged 50p total, and suddenly the economics don't make a lot of sense.

But if you increase the cost of the item about 99p you're suddenly going to start being charged the insertion fee, which for a magazine is 10p.

So if you raise the initial price to £1.15 cover the additional fee, now you're being charged 10p to post the auction, and of course the end fees rise a bit too! It's the classic vicious circle that means you end up having to post the thing at £2 to make your money back, but then of course nobody wants to bid!

So why not add the extra on to the postage? Well technically it says that you're not allowed to raise your postage cost to cover this fee!

And what about offering free postage? Have they looked at the cost of postage nowadays? It costs 60 p just to send a letter.  Well if you add 60p to the 35p of charges, that's 95p of a 99p auction!

Oh, and another thing that amused me (if you didn't laugh you'd have to kill somebody) - e-bay now trumpets that they offer a money back guarantee if you're not happy with the item.  Yes, that's right; e-bay offers a money back guarantee on your item.  You've got no say in the matter...

official cereal bar

Well it's been an eventful couple of days, but in order to give me a chance to find some space I thougth I'd post the one I missed last week.

There's three words that tell you everything that's wrong with the modern world.

Nature Valley Cereal Bars are the official Cereal Bar Supplier to the London 2012 Olympics.

Now don't get me wrong here - I'm sure Nature Valley makes a lovely cereal bar.  And if the sports in the Olympics are your bag then I'm sure it's a lovely thing.  If you've got tickets and you're going along to an event then I hope you have a great time.

But why does the Olympics need an official cereal bar supplier?

When the Greeks were wrestling each other, naked and slathered in oil, on top of some mountain somewhere, do you honestly think that the proposition of having an official cereal bar supplier would have made them realise that that's where they'd been going wrong all these years - no official supplier of cereal bars!

Side stepping the issues of the fact the Greeks probably didn't know what a cereal bar was, let alone care, why does the Olympics need an official anything?  Why is the Olympics a brand?  Why does it need marketing?  If it needs those things to pay for it why is it costing us taxpayers a small fortune?

The British Grand Prix doesn't have an official supplier of cereal bars (though I don't doubt Bernie has spent many a misty-eyed moment dreaming of all the extra cash he could rake in if he could just pursued everybody else that what F1 really needs is a bunch of official suppliers of stuff that's irrelevant to the successful undertaking of the sport).  Wimbledon doesn't have an official supplier of cereal bars.

Heck, I don't think even football - the veritable flagship of just how much rampant capitalism can fuck up good things - has an official supplier of cereal bars.  I mean, I'm pretty sure it has sponsors and I would guess it has official suppliers of things like footballs and I know the team's kit is supplied by a sportswear supplier.

But that's my point - sponsorship has an air of "normality" to it (even if it can leave a bad taste in the mouth) and supplying stuff the sport needs makes sense (even if, again, it's a bit capitalist of my personal taste) but having an "official supplier" of something that plainly isn't essential is just not right.

This rant was brought to you by Reebok - the official supplier of trainers to the transperambulation blog.

just frigging BLOW

Don't you just hate people who don't blow their nose?

There are two sub-species of this annoying behaviour - first there are the chronic sniffers, and then there are the suckers.

Your first variety are people who just steadfastly refuse to blow their nose at all. Perhaps they've got a cold or just happen to have a bit of random snot or some other irritation in their conk, but instead of getting a tissue or handkerchief and having a good hard blow to get rid of it, they'll sit their sniffing. Every few minutes it'll be sniff... sniff... sniff... sniff - it drives me potty.

But I hate the second variety even more, for these people have somehow managed to grow up without ever realising the whole point of blowing your nose is to BLOW. You BLOW to push the unwanted foreign matter out of your nose. That's the whole idea and it's also why it's called BLOWing your nose.

But not these people. Oh no, blowing is too good for them. They suck. Both figuratively and literally.

They'll get their tissue, raise it to their nose and just as you think they're about to give a good blow and clear their conk, instead they squeeze the end of their nose as if they're trying to wring the snot out. In addition, either at the same time as this ineffectual squeeze or just after releasing their nose, they'll give a big sniff, sucking the root cause of the problem back up, instead of pushing it out.

I know all these intimate details, because my sister is that most heinous of beings - a cross-mix of both 1 and 2. She'll spend hours sniffing and sniffing, then when she finally does blow, it'll be of the ineffectual suck variety!

For years I was convinced she'd developed this strategy purely to torment me, but then I encountered other people that did the same thing.

Seriously - how hard can it be? Blowing your nose means BLOWing it.