I’ve seen this referenced in two different sitcoms in the past few weeks. Are people really making this mistake?
I guess some would, but a person who has built even one dollhouse wouldn’t.
They did that on The Middle didn’t they?
Yup.
The ur-example is confusing ’ and " marks when building Stonehenge.
The version I heard is of buying a picture of something like an XBOX. This one sounds like outright fraud, even if it is the buyer’s fault in not reading clearly. I did something similar years ago except the seller just misposted a cassette in the CD section and only marked it with the vague “CS.”
Here is an actual ebay listing for a 36" flat screen. It couldn’t be more obvious that it’s a flat screen, right?
Here is the seller’s story and questions he got from potential buyers.
This American Life had a story like that, in a show intro:
Sometimes dollhouse (or, maybe I should say “miniatures”) furniture is jaw-droppingly expensive, so the price won’t necessarily clue you in that it isn’t full-sized. And I know there have been times when I’ve been looking for something, and the first 100 listings are key-chain charms of whatever it is I’m searching for. Apparently, no matter what it is, there is a keychain charm of it. Now when I search, I automatically add -keychain to the search. Seriously, I have searched for car parts, and and pachinko marbles, and come up with keychain versions. There is a whole line of pachinko marble jewelry.
This kind of thing has been going on almost as long as eBay has been around. I remember a story from only a year or so after it started about someone putting the empty box from some electronic toy (PS2, I think) on eBay. It was bid up to something over $20 by people who didn’t pay attention to it being clearly labeled an empty box. The winner then complained about the box being empty.
I just bought some Post-it Notes on ebay.
At the big office supply stores, Post-it notes, are pretty expensive, so I was pleased when I found a listing for:
They were really neat, too - the design was like an iPhone screen.
So, I was a bit annoyed when I got them, and found that they weren’t Post-it notes at all. They were just pads of paper. So, I went back and looked at the listing closely, and this is what I saw:
So, I left them negative feedback.
Now, they are trying to get me to remove my feedback if I accept a refund, and I said the only way I would do that is if they removed “Post-it” and “sticky” from the title.
Except in the case of buying doll/child furniture it doesn’t seem to be as much of a thinly-veiled scam as it is a genuine misunderstanding.
Note that Post-It is a trademark, so if the seller balks at changing the title, you might report them.
This actually kinda happened in real life. Back in 1919, a developer/huckster got the residents of Wichita Falls to invest in a 480" high skyscraper which still stands today.
I once got burned when I bought an old magazine, and missed that it was just the cover for the magazine, said fact buried within about 20 screens of boilerplate info on the bottom.
I don’t know who saves covers without the contents or why they bother to list them. Maybe they do so to make a little extra on shipping, since it costs so much less for just a cover.
eBay loses a lot of sales to me because the descriptions are inadequate.
Sellers will also remove the posters from Nintendo magazines and sell those alone, usually without mentioning that they’re from a magazine, because they can fetch more money than selling the complete magazine with poster.
It’s common for places that sell magazines to get credit for unsold ones from the previous month. Most publishers require you to prove that they didn’t sell by sending them back to get credit. But not the whole magazine, just the torn-off cover. (Same for paperback books, I believe. Some stores sell books without the cover – they are cheating the publisher and the author, who gets no royalties for such copies.)
I don’t know what the publishers do with the covers after they count them and credit the store; I imagine they are trashed. Probably easy for employees (or garbagemen) to take a bunch of those.
I haven’t seen one of these stores since the 1980s, when they cracked down on the practice. Seemed at the time like a great cheap way to buy books, until I found out what was really going on.
Possible. And it’s possible that these covers then sat in someone’s attic for over 50 years before being discovered and placed on eBay. But… Well, I can’t prove they weren’t. Seems unlikely, though.
Yeah, look in the front near the copyright page for a message saying that if you bought it without a cover, you bought stolen goods. Some are more descriptive than others as I remember scratching my head about the idea when I was young.
It’s like when you buy some cheap defective item, and the seller just refunds your money instead of asking to inspect it because it will cost more to ship it back. They just want the covers as proof, and the retailers are supposed to mulch the rest.
As smart as I try to appear here, I will confess that I made this exact mistake when I ordered a chair a couple of months ago. It’s kind of cute sitting next to my real furniture, though.
I went through this myself about three months ago. I play the board game Agricola and there were some expansion sets that had been out of print for several years. They’re incredibly hard to find and if you do see them, they sell for around $150.
So I was amazed when I saw the main expansion being sold for $50 and the seller was throwing in some other expansions with it. The guy said it was used but in good condition. But he was selling the stuff for about a third of its normal value or less.
I kept trying to figure out if there was something I was missing and the guy wasn’t really selling what I thought it was. But I finally decided to take the chance. And it was indeed the expansion I was looking for plus the other stuff he had said.