[SEL] Low rent Bastard

[Listerdiesel]

On 12/28/05, Luke Tonneberger <flywheelin at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Tommy,
>
> Yep, Jon isn't the one selling the photos. I wasn't very clear in my note. I
> agree 100% that it is buyer beware. What he is doing though is not honest in
> my book.
>
> Luke Tonneberger

OK, let's look at the other side of the coin here a minute.

I was looking for a BYB, have been for some time, and I contact Chuck
Wendle before Portland to see what he could offer in the way of
overseas shipping on a volume. Turns out he was quoting carriage
included for the USA, but to ship a single volume over to the UK would
have been a fair bit extra, so much so that it started to look
uneconomic.

I asked a few engine guys over here if they would want to get together
with me and buy 10 books, pay bulk Media Mail shipping and sell the
spares to friends or whatever. With 6 or 7 of us that would have made
sense and the other spare volumes would have sold eventually.

In the death nothing happened. There were two or three that were all
for going for it, but we couldn't get enough to justify spending the
total, and as one of use would have had to stump up nearly $800 up
front, the sums didn't work.

Just before Xmas I saw the ebay ads and looked at the leather bound
presentation book, even put a bid on it but as expected it was too
expensive. I also look on Smokestak most days and followed the threads
on there.

Finally, I bought a mint 1983 embossed leatherette book from a book
dealer, he shipped it over before Xmas but it hasn't got here yet.

What I am trying to show here is that while we can all have a pop at
the guy who is selling the books on ebay, it is not that straight a
path for the guy in the street to get hold of one, and ebay has become
the source of choice for finding stuff that you cannot buy at the
corner shop.

If the guy has a "Buy it Now" price but ALSO a regular starting price
that is within the realms of reasonableness, then I can't see that we
have a lot to grumble about. Sure he is picking up a decent to large
profit if they go BIN, but nobody is forced to pay that if they don't
want to. I've just finished selling a load of Lister stuff on ebay
over Xmas, and the number of people who wanted me to finish early,
pull the auctions etc etc was crazy.

It's a fact of life now that ebay has created some twisted situations
that are not always ethically or morally correct, but we all
contributed to them being there.

Peter
--
Peter A Forbes
Email: listerdiesel at gmail.com
Web: www.oldengine.org/members/diesel