Default by Default

[BCEmporium]

This week I got a bit of hassle, not much in value, but the young Slovak guy really made me amazed by his views. To explain the situation:

I bough something on eBay UK, upon winning asked the seller to send me the total with postage. He gave £8.50 for postage - just twice as much it really costs (for the weight of the item it would be lower than £4). But I just picked his issued invoice and paid it. Fair enough... I though the next time I would hear from this guy would be to set his feedback.
Too bad! About 3 hours later he sent me a message that now "he doesn't ship overseas" and if I was still up to buy I'd have to pay him an extra £5.
Don't know what went with him for those 3 hours; got drunk/ran out of drugs/whatever; but not only he was defaulting a contract already paid as also came up with an extortion attempt.
My reaction was to threat him on file a complaint on him on eBay, Paypal and then set him negative feedback.

And at this point I got amazed! And by what I can see on many contracts mine and from friends, it's now a very common ground to finds guys like this:
- He just said that couldn't see what eBay would do to him because he did nothing wrong, and even tried to contest the negative feedback I gave him.

As I see people here vouching for anarchy and believing on behaviors that are no longer. Not so long ago all it would take to firm a contract would be the word of the ones making it and the witness of 2 people, later on we came to put it written and now not even a written contract can be trusted.
To the worse isn't just the defaulting contracts, but the mentality that comes along. Again not so long ago the one defaulting would try to avoid the other party at all cost and was ashamed of being in default, today however most of them just come to bullshit themselves into an "I did nothing wrong" state of mind. And this is where the danger lives on, not the default but "defaulting others as part of acceptable" - this is the same as saying for those breaking contracts or change the rules along way without approval from the other party is... moral.

By my theory, I believe we came to this by practical terms. The explosion of credit made people consume more than what they could afford and at some point many found themselves unable to pay for it and facing 2 internal options: «live with the shame of being non-trustworthy» / «bullshit themselves into more or less bogus reasons to make it look morality acceptable to themselves: the banker is richer / interest is robbery / the wall of the bank is painted in white / any shit they could rely on, whether make sense or not at all».

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[Nefario]

Did paypal give you your money back?

[BCEmporium]

Did paypal give you your money back?

Not yet, it takes a week until I can turn the dispute into a PayPal case... so far it's just frozen under the dispute.

[Jaime Frontero]

ebay used to care about sellers.  it made sense, since that's where all their money came (and still comes) from.

they never got a dime from buyers.  still don't, AFAIK.

nowadays they kiss buyer butt.  sellers can't even leave neg feedback for bad buyers.  i really don't get it - but i don't have to; i just don't sell there anymore.

makes no sense to me at all.

[BCEmporium]

ebay used to care about sellers.  it made sense, since that's where all their money came (and still comes) from.

they never got a dime from buyers.  still don't, AFAIK.

nowadays they kiss buyer butt.  sellers can't even leave neg feedback for bad buyers.  i really don't get it - but i don't have to; i just don't sell there anymore.

makes no sense to me at all.

The money is in both sides; you won't get sellers to sell anything without buyers as you don't get buyers to buy anything without sellers. The desired point has to be equilibrium not butt kissing either.

Still my issue isn't with eBay itself, but with this increasing mentality of default contracts believing "to not be doing nothing wrong". This could happened on eBay as any other site else.

[m4rkiz]

im both seller and buyer on ebay and imo it is quite ok for both sides, same with paypal (fees on both are high though)

i could understand couple extra quids for packaging if he is posting delicate, valuable items thorough all europe,
anyway http://cennik.posta.sk/ says that 1kg, registered, large envelope, to uk will cost €8.70 with €100 insurance
so he may have his reason to charge 8 quids, but increasing total after receiving payment would be deal breaker for me

i had two situations like that with postage to Sri Lanka and Kenya, but i see no reason to charge buyer more for that,
it was me that set the price after all

[FatherMcGruder]

As I see people here vouching for anarchy and believing on behaviors that are no longer.

Anarchists will have to defend themselves from exploitative non-anarchists. Isn't that kind of obvious?