Just My Rant

Exactly how much money do these massive corporations need before they are happy? Is there limit, because I sure has hell don’t see it and things are REALLY starting to get stupid! This is the first of what I’m sure will be many many rants about the corporate machine, their greed and their honest to god lack of concern for their customers, employees or any other human being (hell any being for that fact) that might be affected by what they do. I’ve got some real favorites here & I welcome suggestions from anyone out there to expose these blood sucking vampires to the public.

My first victim, if you will, is an old favorite of anyone who has been on the internet for any amount of time, eBay. I have used them to sell items for so many years I can’t even begin to count them. Hell I was a member back when they couldn’t keep their servers up and running for more than a day at a time! It always seemed like a great service and WAS fairly priced for many years. Yes they had problems, as any new company does but we all worked through them and the site grew immensely popular (NO DUH). I honestly don’t think there’s a person in the civilized world who hasn’t at least heard the name, let alone used the service but now they have EVERYONE by the proverbial short hairs and the greed is running rampant!

AS with many eBayers, as they are called, I’m just trying to get rid of some junk we have lying around the house before we sell it. I have used the service to try to make extra money before but this is just garage sale ‘junk’, but hey why not try, a buck is a buck. Usually I just list my items at the site but several friends have told me about their turbo lister so I figured Id give it a try, downloaded it & I was off and listing. I worked through the initial “what the hell do I do” phase of the software and finally started getting things listed. I did notice however that some things were set up differently, like the fact that you could upload multiple pictures of your item without what SEEMED like an extra charge. Cool beans, I don’t have to make images and HTML pages, upload them to my server & then set up a link in my ad to them - awesome! So away I went. Now mind you I’m selling $4 & $5 items here. I listed about $100 worth of items, all in a standard auction format without the ‘buy it now’ feature even though I did like it and had used it for years.

After a week 1/2 my items hadn’t sold so I decided to give them one more try but this time I re-listed them on the site, with a buy it now price. To my horror I saw that I was being charged 30 cents for each of the extra images I had put up through turbo lister and WAS NEVER TOLD. You see when you list through the website 90% of the fields have their famous little notes next to them Extra charge applies. What pissed me off even more was that the popular buy it now feature that had been free now had a 5 cent fee on it! What the HELL!. I also noticed that if I wanted to put a reserve on the item that your ‘insertion fee’ was also increased if your item didn’t sell, OH BOY that makes sense, I have to pay more because my item DIDN’T sell. Needless to say I was furious! I went to look at what my account balance was and found I owed eBay more than I had even sold. Now there’s a winning business strategy! So I started looking around at all the absolutely asinine fees they are trying to suck out of people and I have to tell you this is some GREAT scam they have going. Things such as Bold text on your auction title, a ’super sized’ picture script and a silly ass little ‘gift icon’, just to name a few, are costing people a fortune when in fact it costs eBay NOTHING for these items, yes I mean nothing. Now, I have nothing against a company providing a service and getting paid for that service, that’s the basis of any business but what eBay has done is to add new little ‘features’ for free, get people used to using them and then sneak in a fee later to the ones people like and use.

One thing you may have forgotten is that I am a programmer who specializes in website technology so I know EXACTLY how these things are built & folks I have to tell you these con artists are raping the public, just because the public doesn’t know any better and THAT’S WHAT WE HAVE TO STOP! So let’s take a look at eBay & their little scam here.

I ran a test item through just for this article (no I didn’t submit it). My item had a starting price of $2, a reserve price of $5, a ‘buy it now’ of $5, the silly ass little gift icon, a sub title, the super sized picture script, a ‘gallery image’ and a bold title, and oh yeah I wanted my auction to run 10 days instead of the standard 7. Want to take a guess? How about a total listing fee of $4.85 ……. are we NUTS or what! So let’s break this down so almost anyone can understand what they are charging for.

The insertion fee is a percentage based on the starting price, so far so good & I consider it fair because it is based on the starting price. Next, the subtitle …… 50 cents for a piece of data that’s the equivalent of you taking a molecule of water & putting it into a 16 oz. glass but you know what, if you need a sub title so be it but lets look at the really slick scam they have going. How about that BOLD text on the title … that must be tough to do? How about this code to make it happen: <b>Text Here</b>…. and folks its done by a machine that can rip out hundreds of thousands of lines of code such as this in a nanosecond. NO human being even thinks about it happening. So that’s worth a dollar EACH listing? How about that OH SO CUTE, little gift icon … oh isn’t that cute? I ’swiped’ their image just so I could be precise about this, its a total of 422 bytes in size (I know, what’s that?) in lay mans terms you could fit 2800 of these things on a standard floppy disc, they take up NO size on a server, cost nothing to display and probably took 1/2 hour to create in Photoshop. Now just for you who don’t know, the exact same image is used for every listing - in other words this companies MASSIVE servers have only ONE of them on the machine. 25 cents EACH listing! REALLY! How about another 20 cents to have your auction run 10 days instead of 7, WHY? It costs EBAY NOTHING to do this, not one penny more. How about 30 cents PER addition picture you upload? OK, this costs them some MINUTE amount for transfer (probably 1/1000 of a cent) - so why do I complain, well I used to upload my images to MY server & put links in my text that would allow the user to see them. Plain and simple I wasn’t going to pay them for something I could do in a second & cost me NOTHING. OH NO YOU CANT DO THAT! eBay will send you a nasty email and if you don’t take them out they will cancel your auction AND KEEP YOUR LISTING FEE!

So I think I’ve made my point but we’re not done here. You might say ‘why the heck would you put all that crap on a $2 item’. Well normally you wouldn’t but it gets more expensive the more your item is worth. I changed the starting price on my ‘test’ listing to $200, with a reserve of $500 and a buy it now of $500. The fee almost tripled to $13.10! Remember now that NOTHING in this change cost eBay one cent, NOTHING. The reserve fee was $5, $5 freaking dollars more to make sure you don’t sell your item for less than it’s worth. Why, because eBay doesn’t get their ‘final sale fee’ if you don’t sell it! Yup, they get you coming & going with this scam & they want to make you sell your item without the ability to not give it away so they can bang you with the second set of fees or they are gonna scam you out of that final fee up front!

Once your item sells this master of greed now charges you a percentage of the final sale price, a sliding scale fee that, for most items is about 5% of whatever the item ended at. So now we have our original fee of $4.85, a final fee of 50 cents (assuming it sold at $5) for a total, so far of $5.35 ….. well we only lost 35 cents on the deal, no no no, not so fast. eBay isn’t done with you yet! As most people know eBay bought Paypal a while ago. That in itself says something, that within 5 years of opening their door they were able to buy an established online bank. Guess those 50 cent fees add up! Why did they buy them? Because they saw that a good 50% of their users where paying for auctions via this service and saw ANOTHER way to make money off the exact same sale. So, we have to charge our customer shipping right? Lets say $4 shipping since UPS are the king of thieves for a total of $9. The buyer decides to pay with Paypal and we get charged ANOTHER 50 cents on the item because Paypal gets a piece of the TOTAL cost, not just the auction ending amount. Grand total: $5.85 in fees. Now multiply that times the hundreds of thousands of auctions handled every day by eBay, not a bad scam!

Now here’s the real scary part. You can get an almost duplicate piece of software that can be added to ANY phpBB (like the one we have) that does EVERYTHING that eBay’s site does, cost ……… not one penny, it’s free from the open source community and can be downloaded and installed in a couple of good days.

I was ranting to a friend and fellow eBay user about this problem the other day (yes I rant in real life too) and do you know what his answer was? What can you do? ARE WE FREAKING KIDDING HERE? This my friends is why these corporations keep screwing us for more and more money every time we blink. The general public has become so complacent about being ‘taken’ they just shrug their shoulders and say, OH WELL … what can you do? What in the hell happened to the spirit of humans that they won’t even stand up and fight back, even when it DOES affect them personally. GOD DAMMIT THAT PISSES ME OFF!

Have we become such sniveling babies that we will let any corporation tell us what we can and can’t do, that they want more money for the same (or usually less) service and not even put up a fight! Oh I can hear some of you right now saying ‘what can one person do against a big corporation?’ - How about hit them EXACTLY where it hurts the most, in the wallet! People seem to forget that THEY are the customer, without us there is NO corporation! Look at what Jimmy Hoffa did when the truckers were getting screwed in the 60’s. He shut down every damn truck in the nation for a day and scared the hell out of all the corporations and even the government. They paid attention to them then didn’t they? NO, none of us are Jimmy Hoffa but EVERYONE of us adds to the dollars these companies make. If people stopped using services that were screwing them or started complaining on a daily basis sooner or later they will have to listen! Folks you’re getting screwed EVERY day for some silly little fee that you ignore, or choose to ignore. To you it may only be pennies but when you add this up to the companies whole customer base it is millions!

This greed is in no way limited to eBay or any online company, this poison is festering in almost every corporation today, no matter how ‘customer-based’ they appear on the surface. You don’t have to go to far to find examples, Enron, Martha Stewart to name a few. These company’s ‘big whigs’ are pulling millions in salaries every year. What most average people don’t understand about the profits these companies report is that they are AFTER these salaries are deducted, salaries are a deduction as a company expense. So if you have 20 ‘fat cats’ pulling in 20 million dollar salaries the company’s profits are 400 million less, all for 20 people. How do they pay these outrageous salaries? From the nickels & dimes from you & I. The same little fees that most of you ignore or feel there is nothing you can do about! It has gotten so far out of hand it’s not funny, a small percentage of people drinking $1000 a glass champagne from $5000 glasses while most ‘average’ people are scrambling on a daily basis to just pay their bills and feeds their families. Why the HELL aren’t people rioting in the streets or at least telling these companies to pound salt? If we look at history we can find the same set of circumstances have happened before, take Russia for example. Before the communists took over the wealth was controlled by the czar & a selected few. It took a MASSIVE bloody revolution to overthrow them but the end result, communism, was almost as bad as the original problem. So we, as consumers have a choice. Start fighting back little by little, or let things spiral out of control until something similar to the Russian revolution happens. But for gods sake don’t just sit there on your ass, look at your bills and fight back - it’s YOUR money these corporate ’swine’ are using to pay for that $100,000 a day hotel suite!

BTW, I just found two new articles about eBay from the stock reports. The first one says they are reporting a 77% jump in third quarter earnings and that sales (those lovely little fees) had increased by 50% ….. all the while screwing YOU, their loyal customer with a nickel here, a dollar their. Article number two, from CNN Money tells how eBay just bought rent.com for 415 million dollars. Looks they are about to start screwing all the renters out there. Unreal! Well I for one WON’T be using eBay any longer … I’ll survive.

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