Reply To: Mr Sellers will send me broke ;)

Before this degenerates into personal bickering. please let me make a couple of points.

First, Larry Geib is absolutely correct in pointing out that you pay a hefty premium for the convenience of shopping for tools on the internet as opposed to seeking them out and buying them in face-to-face transactions (flea markets, car boots, estate sales etc.) just as you will pay more for a gallon of milk at a convenience store/corner shop than you would at Kroger or Tesco. Sometimes the convenience is worth the difference in price and maybe there is no reasonable alternative.

Also some regions,such as the northeastern and north central US and (probably) most of Great Britain are rich in used tools. Other areas, like most of the American West and maybe Australia are “old tool deserts”. Folks in these places have relatively few options.

Larry is absolutely right when he describes the use of Ebay’s auto bid “feature” as “stupid”. I don’t think that he meant to call those who have been conned into using it “stupid”. It is designed to drive prices (and Ebay’s commissions) as high as possible. People who actually win Ebay auctions for reasonable prices “snipe”. That is, they wait until the closing seconds of the auction to submit their bids. You can either do this manually (a major PITA IMHO) or use a service like esnipe which does it automatically for a small fee.

Dave