A few weeks ago I bought an Xbox on eBay. I wanted it to build a media center for the family room, and after a bit of tweaking I got it working nicely. It’s a great little device, and the price tag of $60 is perfect.
With the Xbox came a stack of games which I didn’t want: a handful of John Madden NFL games, NHL, snowboarding, and the all-too-popular Grand Theft Auto (motto: “hey kids, smoking crack and beating up prostitutes is fun!“). I figured I’d sell them on eBay and get a couple bucks back, lowering the price of my new media center still further.
So I listed them with a starting price of a dollar, and a shipping cost of ten dollars. Ten bucks seemed reasonable to mail seven DVD cases.
The auction ended with a single bid, which was (naturally) a dollar. So I collected my $11.00 and went to the post office today to send them. The cost? $10.95.
Whee! I made five cents on the games. But wait– eBay charged me 40 cents to list the item, plus another 22 cents based on the selling price. So in the end, I paid for some guy in Pennsylvania to take seven games off my hands.
Chalk that up as Dumb Financial Decision #156.