Listia - Take It Or Leave It

Have you ever heard the term "a day late and a dollar short"? Of course you have.

Wouldn't that be cool?

If you're anything like me, you're about a month-and-a-half late and several hundred dollars short.

In my younger years I used to say I was "fashionably late". Now the "fashionably" is nowhere to be found, and I am just late. In fact, one of my recurring posts is called "Wearing The Late Crown". In the few short months that I've been blogging there have been three. There will be more.

So it was no surprise that when I heard about this thing called Listia, I had absolutely no idea what it was. In fact I even dedicated an entire post describing to everyone reading just what little knowledge I had.

You can read how clueless I was here.

A couple bloggers were nice enough to email me personally and give me some advice and tell me their experiences with Listia. That was very cool.

Now, I get aggravated very easily. It's something I've had a problem with ever since I was a kid. I don't get violent, at least not towards people or animals. (Inanimate objects like printers or video game controllers, now that's a different story.) Instead I would says something along the lines of "I'm not f'n dealing with/doing this anymore!" and that would be the end of that.

Consequently, I would give up on things too easy. So I tried to remedy that as I got older by giving things more of a chance. For the most part, all that did was enable me to spend too much time/money/effort on things that I should have not bothered with in the first place, or I took too long to realize that my time was better spent elsewhere.

Some years ago when I was looking for a part-time job I was approached by someone who worked for a MLM company. Although I never attempted to sell anything while I was with them, I went to meetings for a while. You've probably heard the term "Time is Money". What was stressed at these meetings was that your time has value to it and should always be considered when you do things. I use this concept a lot when I do things now and used it when I considered whether or not I was going to seriously pursue Listia.

For example, I prefer Target over Wal-Mart. Target is usually a tad more expensive, but I spend way less time waiting in line. I can get in and out of Target quickly. Wal-Mart can consume half my day.
So I go to Target whenever possible.

I was told that while on Listia I would have to do some searching because there was a lot of junk on there. Now THAT was an understatement. So ignoring anything that didn't have free shipping, I spent some time perusing the website. I had acquired a small amount of credits and placed a few bids on some cards that I thought would be cool to have.

I would be the high bidder for a bit, then I would get an email that I was outbid. So I would put in a higher bid. This would repeat itself until I felt that the cards weren't worth the credits needed to win, so I would stop bidding.

So I bid on some cards I didn't really want, just to "win" something.

Same story.

Then I bid on cards I didn't think ANYBODY would want. Like really beat up ones.

Believe it or not, the same story.

I couldn't believe the amount of credits that it would take to win these cards that had scribbles on them, tape marks, etc.

Here are a few examples of some outrageous starting bids I saw today:

999 credits for a pack of 1991 Upper Deck Baseball
15, 500 credits for a 1991 set of Topps Football (no bids, I wonder why)
499 credits for 10 assorted junk wax cards

It seems 499 credits is the new standard opening bid, because I see this a lot. Many of these "lots" have zero bids, so I don't see the point in "pricing" it so high. If you were to buy these cards at a show, you could get all of them for less than a dollar.

I'm also not able to "watch" these auctions consistently, so some of them end while I'm working and I find out I was outbid after it was over. One of the times that I bid on a card I didn't want was only to see what would happen towards the end of the auction, because I was going to be home when it ended. There were more bid changes in the last 30 seconds than there was in the previous 5 hours I was watching it. The winning bid came with 3 seconds left.

So I decided if I'm not going to win anything, there's no point in listing anything, since the credits I would get are no good anywhere else.

So rather than spending my time on Listia, I'd rather use it on something worthwhile.

Trading with my fellow bloggers.

Because of the blogosphere I've been able to trade cards (and stories) with several bloggers.  Nick at Dime Boxes, Oscar at All Trade Bait, All The Time, Mark at This Way To The Clubhouse and Shane at Shoebox Legends are just a few of the bloggers that I've either communicated or traded with over the past few weeks.

Until about a year and a half ago, I had no idea the blogosphere even existed. I found it accidentally while searching for information about baseball cards. I stumbled on a blog called "Night Owl Cards", and enjoyed it so much I started at his first post and read every single one. From there I went to "Play At The Plate", then eventually created a profile, started commenting on blogs until I finally created my own.

I can honestly say that by reading and joining the blogosphere I am enjoying collecting as much as when I was a kid.

All of you bloggers out there are DEFINITELY worth my time.

I tried Listia, I didn't like it. I like reading all the blogs and trading with y'all instead.

So that's what I'm going to spend my time doing.

For what it's worth.