I keep seeing these new Ebay commercials on TV trying to convince me that I should enjoy ‘winning’ something as opposed to simply just buying it. They all depict different situations of winning something, such as a football game where the football is replaced by some fancy vase.
These commercials could not make me hate the thought of purchasing something any more. We’re a civilized society (well, not always the case, but go with it)! We don’t have to club each other over the head for the last piece of meat anymore. We have developed a complex system of trading goods and services that uses a little thing called money. Money is an amazing thing because you can give it to somebody and then they will either give you something or do something for you, sometimes both. There’s no competition between the buyer and the seller. There is, of course, competition between sellers. That does not mean, however, that we should create competition between the buyers.
A big counterpoint to this whole rant would be the existence of auctions, beyond just Ebay. People have been auctioning stuff for a gazillion years, and it looks like it will continue to happen until the end of the world on December 23, 2012. In defense of my original point, I see auctions as a method of selling something adapted to the situation that the good or service being sold is somehow unique or special and many people want it. This applies just as well to limited edition Ferraris as it does to the cupcake that the lucky kid has at the lunch table in the cafeteria. But if, for example, the lunch lady was selling those cupcakes then the auction would be rather worthless. Even if it was sold for cheaper than what the lunch lady was selling it for, only one person reaps the benefit of that deal while the rest ignore the whole thing and head for the counter. In the case of Ebay, it’s like there are a bunch of cupcake kids filling up the cafeteria, but the lunch lady is still there. The best part about the lunch lady is that she is reliable whereas nobody knows what those cupcake kids did to their merchandise. Hell, maybe one of them is a prince from Nigeria that will give you a fortune if you just let him borrow a few hundred dollars from you.
Ebay’s recent advertising campaign is just another step backwards in this wonderfully-mediocre culture of ours. And yes, I do think that it is kind of funny that my Half.com (Ebay) profile is one of the first results when googling ‘fedorpheux’.
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