eBay is such a horrible hassle these days. I tried selling a few things recently, and between the horrible UI, all the hassles with payments, answering questions and shipping it turned out to be a huge waste of time.

I am sitting on a small fortune of items I would like to get rid of, but I don't want to deal with strangers on Craigslist or going through the eBay rigomarole. An ideal solution would have been an eBay drop-off shop, but it seems that these went the way of the Dodo.

eBay drop-off store is an idea that many have tried, but it turned out mostly like Seinfeld's Michigan deposit scam.

In one episode Newman keeps trying to find a way to make a scheme that would bring New York cans and bottles to Michigan, which has a 10 cent deposit instead of New York's 5 cent one. Kramer keeps telling him that it would not work due to the transportation overhead, but finally Newman figures out a way to get a postal truck for free.

It seems that the time overhead is so high on running an eBay store is so high, that most of the bigger ones that tried it went out of business.

In reality the Michigan deposit scam is against the law, but it actully costs the state 14 million a year in lost revenues. It's doable.

eBay is showing Twitter-like incompetence in serving its customers. While Google gives its customers huge amounts of storage, email, and software for free, eBay can't seem to provide free image galleries and other useful services, selling out its customers to an unsavory bunch of third party providers. Image storage is not a very difficult technical problem, and neither is url shortening, but eBay and Twitter are still in the dark about it.

Instead of making selling on eBay easy, developing drop off stores, and making its service better eBay seems to be focused on buying and selling unrelated busenesses for billions of dollars (and losing money on it).

Remember that The Simpsons episode where Starbucks swallows every store in Springfield mall?

"... Bart, while walking through the Springfield Mall, passing several Starbucks, goes into a store called "In and Out Piercing".
Employee: Can I help you?
Bart: I'd like to get my ear pierced.
Employee: Well, better make it quick, kiddo. In five minutes this place is
becoming a Starbucks.
Bart gets his ear pierced, and has a diamond-shaped clear stone inserted into the new hole. As he leaves the store, it, like all of the other stores above and around it, is transformed into Starbucks."

New York City was one of the last markets that Starbucks entered, mostly because of high real estate costs. But besides Starbucks, there are two types of businesses that swallow an enormous portion of commercial space in NYC: drugstores and banks. Whenever you see a sizable store for rent, it's almost inevitable that it will become a drugstore or a bank.

The drugstore business is not particularly profitable, but one chain, Duane Reade, seems to be opening store after store. In my neighborhood there are two Duane Reades one block from each other, and several other equally lame pharmacies. There's an interesting article called The Mystery of Duane Reade which among other things, addresses a question just as interesting as "Who is John Galt." Unlike Galt, Duane Reade is not really a person. The crummy drugstore chain derives it's name from the first store that was located on the corner of Duane St. and Reade St. in Manhattan.

Banks are even worse real estate hogs, and are popping up even faster than Duane Reade and Starbucks. There are two stores that went out of business recently in my neighborhood, and both are being replaced by banks. There's a bank across the street from where I live, and one or two on almost every block. Yet there are no supermarkets bigger than a tiny little Pioneer in a 20 block radius.

The stiff competition is forcing banks to offer new services to attract customers. Commerce Bank, for instance, offers a service called "Penny Arcade." They basically have change-counting Coinstar machines without the fee. All you have to do is get the receipt from the machine, and the cashier will exchange it for paper money.

During the last major cleaning fit that I had, I took my overflowing coin bowl and dumped it into a canvas bag. I weighted it on my Health-o-Meter physician's scale which is exact to within 1/4 lb. The scale read 29 1/2 lb.

Here's what 29 1/2 lb of coins in a Strand bag look like:

I dragged the heavy money bag to the bank, and proceeded to empty it out, handful by handful into the Coinstar machine. I had to suffer loud and annoying cartoon voice aimed at kids and overall felt like a dork, but I got rid of all the change and cashed in my printed receipt. As I was curious of the how exact the coin count was, I asked the cashier for a copy of the receipt. She had to do it by hand for some reason, but here it is:

To calculate how much this should theoretically weight, I need to do a little bit of math. A dollar coin weights in at 8.100g, quarter at 5.670 g, dime at 2.268 g, nickel at 5.000 g and penny at 2.500 g (according to the US Mint)

This gives us: 5 * 8.100g + 358 * 5.670 g + 987 * 2.268 g + 659 * 5.000 g + 1928 * 2.500 g = 12.423876 kg

12.423876 kg = 27.3899581 lb.

That's about 2.1 lb difference from my original weight. The machine rejected a Chinese coin, two Boston subway tokens and a few coins with gunk on them. The bag probably weights at most 1/2 lb. So it seems that the coin-counting automaton cheated me out of a pound of coins. That's about 9 bucks by my calculations.

[Update] I'm told that pre-1982 pennies weight 3.1 grams instead of 2.5, so my calculation is a bit off.

Of course, my experiment is far from exact. It depends on the number of factors, such as the possibility of my scale being not as precise as I think or the possibility that coins lose some weight after being in circulation. But somehow I highly suspect that the Coinstar machines are undercounting. Wall Street Journal journalist ran an experiment with a remeasured amount of money. I can't find the original article, but this quote about $87.26 seems to be floating around a lot:

"For consistency, we began with equal piles of $87.26 worth of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters that we had gotten from a local bank in coin envelopes.

Talk about a tough economy. The machines at both Commerce Bank and Coinstar gave us less back than we put in -- Commerce Bank missed by a whopping $7.02, while Coinstar was off by 57 cents."

Where is Eliot Spitzer when you need him?

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A "rogue" (read "somewhat sloppy, but very interesting") economist tries to answer tough questions, such as: What do schoolteachers and Sumo wrestlers have in common? How is Ku Klux Klan like a group of real-estate agents? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? Where have all the criminals gone?

Back in the late Nineties I remember seeing many, many copies of a book called "24 Hours in Cyberspace" littering the bookshelves at the Strand. There were literally hundreds of copies of the damn thing, and nobody seemed to want to buy it even at half the price. Today they sell starting at 1 cent + shipping over at Amazon.

For some reason I remembered it and decided to buy a copy of my own a couple of days ago. The idea was not bad at all - to have photojournalists in different countries to take a bunch of photographs about people using the Internet during a 24 hour window in February of 1996. I was hoping for a nice time capsule. After leafing through the book again I understood why paying more than a cent for it was not a good investment.

As I said, the idea was good. But it seems like the editor picked the most "special", extreme and unusual uses of the Internet, at the same time selecting the most posed and boring pictures. If you were to believe this book, the average Internet user in 1996 was either physically or mentally challenged, lives in an exotic locale, is a monk of some sort or is really poor. From what I remember, the typical Internet user back then was a pasty white overweight kid or young adult.

As an example of someone running a software company they picked 11 year old Greg Miller of Tenadar Software. Greg should be 20 now, but there seems to be no mentions of him or his company beyond old articles in Wired. I guess 11 year old company founders don't do much better than 25 year olds and older.

There's a sense of "fake" and "posed" permeating the book. It reminds me of the Russian word "pokazuha", a concept probably invented in Russia and best represented by Potemkin villages. An you know what, calling Internet "cyberspace" was not cool even in 1996.

Strangely, not one picture from inside Netscape, even though it was one of the main sponsors of the book. I fully expected to see the famous picture of the Tent of Doom, or at least the Aquarium of Doom. Apparently accordion playing, Speedo-wearing Mahir "I Kiss You" Cagri was not on the web yet. And no mention of Internet soda machines or the Trojan Room coffeemaker.

But then some nostalgic hardware and familiar faces made it into this book.

"Joi Ito, Japan's "Mr. Internet" and teen Idol Reiko Chiba stroll Harajuku, the trendy Tokyo neighborhood that Ito hopes to wire". The pompous caption would probably make Mr. Ito, 9 years older, blush today, but the picture is one of the few that look somewhat non-posed. Teen Idol Reiko Chiba looks genuinely bored, although I am not entirely sure that Japan's "Mr. Internet" is not faking a phone call. That's a nice chunky phone, I might have one like that in my cubicle technology museum. I wonder, was Japan's "Mr. Internet's" writing less boring back then?

[ Image removed due to a complaint by Mr. Boyd. in the image: Joi Ito talking into an early-model cell phone, Reiko Chiba looking bored. ]

(photo credit : Torin Boyd)

And here's the wife of Internet-creation-initiative-taker-in taking a picture with what the book says is a digital camera, but does not look like Apple QuickTake 100, 150 , 200, Kodak DC40 or Casio QV-11.

(photo credit : AP)