"Post No. 496"

Read an article today that eBay is making it mandatory for all sellers and buyers in Australia to use only PayPal. Seems they're experimenting with that there, and you never know when that'll end up here in The States. Needless to say, Australian sellers are pretty outraged by the whole thing, and I can't blame them.

I personally buy off of eBay by either personal check or money order 99% of the time. In fact, the only time I use PP is when I've sold something and the buyer's paid me through that method, putting some funds in my PP account. I never use a credit card through PP or have bank transfers.

If they initiate that method here it would certainly cut back any buying I'd do thru eBay. I would think that it'd hurt eBay's business considerably, but that's not the way it appears to them as they state that it cuts back on fraud. Now if PP wasn't owned by eBay, it'd be different, maybe. But since PP has charged a fee for sellers accepting that method of payment for some time now, it just seems another method of fattening the wallets of the fat cats at eBay.

What it would do is increase the outright sales to other businesses. I for one would simply just save my cash and go to a comic specialty shop more often for my comic fixes instead of looking for deals on eBay. Let's hope the exec's there have better sense than to actually make it mandatory "over here".


And today at work was the usual hectic Friday. I pulled two more pages of tools for my section of the store than usual, leaving half a basket that I didn't have time to put out to work on in the morning. I'm not sure if people are getting their tex rebates or "whatever", but they're certainly spending more than usual this week. We were hard-pressed to get out on time at closing.

And, hey! The t.v. repairman called and my set's ready for pickup! Shame he wasn't opened yesterday when I went by the store as I'll have to wait until Monday to pick it up, but maybe now my days of squinting at this 10" screen are over.