Tell your friends about your listing

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

23 January

This, at any rate, is what one place for hoping to dispose of items (maybe even at a profit) urges on its sellers:

Yes, it's that old Arsebook thing again (and / or whether I should want to tweet about it)!

If it stopped to think about it, is this forum for facilitating selling - seen, one must understand, not from the viewpoint of the corporate or business supplier, but that of the individual - actually trying to do itself out of the tidy fees (plus that VAT thing) that it charges on every transaction?


Follow me, if you will:

1. I have just acquired a very nice copy of, say, Rats of the Twenty-First Century, whose photographs I have carefully flicked through (if one isn't at odds with the other). But I never intended to keep it - my BlackBerry® told me, when I found the book on sale, that it is worth 4 to 5 times what I was being asked to pay for it.

2. Amongst other things already there, I duly list it on the web-site. I even stop to rub my hands in glee, not only at the potential profit on the deal, but at actually being able to make on the flat-rate allowance for postage: because the book is slim (and even not too heavy), it will go as a so-called 'large letter'*.

3. The web-site confirms that I have done so, and then makes this anarchic suggestion: Tell your friends about your listing. (It also does so when I have just placed an order - brilliant surprise, it must be said, if I have just bought it for a friend, who will then see that I have done so!)

4. OK, so I tweet about it and / or put it on my wall (as I understand the practice to be), and all my merry friends, followers and fans (as the case may be) are instantly bothered with tidings of this trivial happening.

5. Except what if Dave, until now, has unsuccessfully been looking for this item (or any suitable item) for his mate Dan's 'big birthday'**?

6. Now, I have something that Dave wants, but Dave and I are reasonable blokes (they do exist), and he knows that, albeit for a quick disposal, I would be losing a lot to give it to him at cost; I, at the same time, know how much, one way or another (i.e. postage, fees, and VAT), will inevitably come off the price at which I have competitively pitched my copy of Rats.

7. So Dave and I will, of course, try to work out an exchange: to have Rats, he will reimburse me what I paid for it (or more, if he wants), and also give me - then or at some other time - his time in painting the fence, stroking the cat (probably pet-sitting), or something else that he can supply to make good as much of my net loss of profit as I am inclined to recover.

8. Dave's happy, I'm happy, and I take the item out of my listing.


No fees or charges paid, though, so maybe someone - who unwisely suggested the whole thing - should be unhappy? Or is it all in the spirit of altruistic love and friendship that is behind all this social networking?!

QED


* How many real letters, as thick as 2.45cm, have you ever had?! (Were they not actually DVDs, to add to your burgeoning collection of 'The Desirable but Unwatched'?)


** How are some birthdays larger than others, and in what does the greater size both consist and evidence itself?

I believe that there may be a circularity, in that one can deduce that the birthday is 'a big one' only by how much fuss people make about it - otherwise, it seems exactly like any other one.


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