Ok, I buy the niece & nephew a lot of books, VHS tapes, & DVD's. There are larcenous LOSERS out there hawking wares for anywhere from "JUST 1 CENT!!" up to whatever, then wanna sock the sucker who buys it for what he could get a ticket on the Concorde to come and pick it up in person for, and that includes the expense of de-mothballing the plane.

Frankly, I'm sick of this practice, NOT simply because there's no way on earth I'm shuckin' out a sawbuck to have a DVD mailed, but because I gotta sift through the ever-increasing amt. of hucksters' auctions to get to the reasonable ones.

Oh, widdo cwy-baby, does hims haffta buy gas? Hey, while you're at it, why not charge mileage? Isn't IRS mileage something like $.43/mi ?? And what about you prorate your light bill, your food bill, your rent, your electric bill, and car insurance?  There's no end. What eBay needs to do is to allow me to flag the practitioners of this reprehensible practice (notice I'm not saying they CAN'T do it...), so they stop cluttering up my searches with more reasonable sellers.

Are you loser morons gonna tell me when you take a bin of eBay goods to the post office, that the DVD sitting over there is going to set you back the extra $5 or $7 your socking the buyer? BALONEY!! Hey, you either need to get a tune-up, or move closer to the post office, because if you take 10 DVD's to be mailed, and "gouge"(it ain't gouging, though, if the buyer's dumb 'nuff to agree to it) each buyer say, $6 above mailer**/postage, that's $60!! At $2/gal, that's 30gal of gas? What the sam H. are you driving to the post office, an aircraft carrier??

It's called "economy of scale", and that's why you buy a widget from China that came factory-truck-ship-train-truck-truck to the $1 store, and you aren't "charged" for tires, tugboat fees, crews' salaries, railyard switching, or warehousing, etc., etc., and the sky's the limit.

Knuckleheads.

My beef with these out-and-out losers is they clutter up the shopping process by mixing in with the reasonable sellers, and because this "I have to buy gas" idiocy is a scam. Do you want to shop at Wal-Mart, and have every item have $7 extra added to it, because Wal-Mart "had to drive it to the store"? Get real. The real padding isn't in the envelope, it's in the exhorbitant s/h fees. I think Amazon has a flat $3.65 or some such for single DVD's, and that includes their "cut". It does NOT cost $5, $7, or $10 to mail a stupid danged DVD.

A few of the more "honest" sellers of kiddie books(I've bought hundreds) out-and-out admitted "My profit is in s/h". Ok, I got good at seeing what it cost to mail a book, and knew when it was $1 over or when it was $3 over. But eBay's gotten worse.

**And a word on "mailers". Look, morons, you ain't gotta go to Office Max and spend $1.94 to get a padded mailer that you can barely jam a DVD into. That Cheerios box you just tossed? Hey, use that, and you got a FREE mailer(turn it inside out if it makes you feel better. Got a used padded mailer? Re-use it. Get a box cutter, and slice up boxes & fold pieces over -- there's seldom a need to buy an actual mailer (ok, I'm talkin' small-timers here, not volume dealers).

eBay's feedback process is grossly lacking. Sure, I got the DVD in a week. What am I gonna do, give neutral or neg. f/b for a voluntary transaction because the s/h stunk? I've given pos. f/b w/ comment on the stiff fees, and they crybabied. That's some nerve -- do they think I don't know it didn't need to cost $4.95 to mail the dumb thing? The f/b should have sep. ratings for quality / comm. / speed / s/h fees / etc.

Tim S. / flagday1960