Above is a card of Jaromir Jagr pictured after he discovered Ebay fees.
I had an interesting experience on Ebay yesterday.
No, it wasn't a problem with a buyer or seller. I was buying a card, and the seller was awesome.
It was a problem with Ebay itself.
I've been away from collecting cards for a few years. I tapped out when everything got silly during the pandemic, and I sold some of my more valuable cards because prices went through the roof.
I haven't used Ebay, COMC, Sportlots, whatever, since then.
Man, has Ebay ever gotten worse. And it was already bad five years ago. I mean, it was bad twenty years ago, but it was also bad five years ago.
I'm Canadian, so shipping is a huge problem for me. Shipping almost always costs more than the card I'm buying, so I have to do bulk purchases, or use some sort of American address to consolidate my mail, or some other fancy footwork to save a few bucks. Even doing that, it's still expensive.
Canadians mostly collect hockey. I prefer baseball and basketball. It's odd, because the Jays and Raptors are both popular here in Toronto, but collecting cards of those sports just isn't. Everything is hockey. Fanatics doesn't even bother with the Canadian market, barely sending anything up here. A lot of the new sports card apps won't allow accounts from Canada. The world is growing smaller.
This brings me to yesterday's Ebay purchase. I found a seller who had a couple cards I want. A 77 Topps baseball card and an 89-90 Fleer basketball. He said he combined shipping. So, I placed the order.
When I got the invoice, however, the shipping was individually priced for $10 each.
I messaged the seller and asked if he could combine shipping. He said he tried, but Ebay's international shipping program wouldn't allow him.
So, literally both the buyer and the seller want to make a transaction for a certain price, but the middleman controls the platform and we had to do what the middleman wanted.
Huh?
That makes no sense. That's completely contrary to any sort of market logic. It's eshittifcation at its finest.
If the buyer and the seller both agree on a set price, then the middleman has no say. That's how markets work. For the middleman to get this much authority in a transaction, they have to essentially capture the market so that all participants are unable to go elsewhere and have to deal with the middleman's bullshit. Like the mafia.
Well, why not go elsewhere? So, I signed up to COMC. I checked their shipping prices to Canada. It's even worse than Ebay! If I bought a stack of cards on COMC and paid to have them shipped here, it would cost nearly $100 Canadian and would take like three months packaging time. That's not to mention the time it takes in transit. Holy!
So, COMC is doing the same thing as Ebay, but worse. They are trying to create a platform where it's difficult for buyers and sellers to move off once they are invested. At that point, COMC can charge what they like and get away with it.
The other thing with COMC is that it's clear they don't want to ship cards. They make fees whenever people buy and sell cards, and if the cards stay on their platform they can earn fees on the same cards over and over. But if cards are shipped, they lose those potential lost sales. So the cards stay on COMC and get sold back and forth as digital assets.
At that point, is it really card collecting? It's more like speculation on digital assets. That's really what card collecting feels more like these days. It's gambling by opening boxes, and then speculating on digital assets. None of this has anything to do with sports cards.
Really, what all of these card companies, gamblers, and speculators want to do is trade NFTs. Sports cards just feel like a way of marketing what end up being digital speculative assets. If they were all cat pictures, no one would care. But if you put a hot NBA rookie on a card, then it's a more attractive asset. It literally has nothing to do with being a fan of the sport, collecting cards, organizing, sorting, trading, and all that stuff us nerds enjoy.
We are at a point in our society where individuals have to work with one another to get around the shitty products and services offered by large companies. None of these companies exist now to make our lives easier. They only exist to bleed us of our money (and our attention!), using a million small tricks to disincentivize us from avoiding them. People call it late stage capitalism, but it's actually post-capitalism. Capitalism is what occurred between the seller and I. Scam economy is what occurred between us and Ebay. We live in a post-capitalist scam economy, and that's apparent as ever in card collecting.
Anyway, my story has a happy ending. The seller was cool. He said he would edit his listing for one of the cards to include both, so he could ship to me for half price. I agreed. He deserved the sale and it was great customer service. It still cost me $10 to ship two cards up to Canada, but welcome to the human race.
No comments:
Post a Comment