Word: ebayers
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Many antiques dealers, who would seem most threatened by eBay, have seen their livelihoods transformed. David James, for example, opened his shop in Alexandria, Va., eight years ago. He deals mostly in what the trade calls smalls: candlesticks, glassware and other such collectibles. He's still got the store, but today his business--and his life--revolve around a warehouse a few miles away, where he stores the treasures he has gleaned from scouting estate sales and flea markets. From a cramped, windowless cubicle, he monitors the hundreds of auctions he has posted--moving anywhere from...
...evidence suggests that eBay represents a return to that earlier one-on-one sociability--and maybe even improves on it, since the Net collapses the traditional divisions of geography and class. Wherever you plant your modem, the fabled new economy arrives--even in the boonies, as Patricia Hoyt calls her hometown of Baker, Mont., roughly 225 miles from the nearest big city, Billings. The old economy of oil and cattle has not been kind to Baker, and when oil prices dropped, business dried up at the motel Hoyt and her husband...
...Hoyt had a hobby: making decorative glass beads. Thanks to eBay, her hobby is now her livelihood. She sells as many as 3,000 beads a month, for as much as $50 each. eBay has given her more than a new career. She refers without irony to the bead community she has discovered online. Glass beads have spawned an entire network of chat groups and e-mail lists. Many of her customers buy weekly. "If I don't put up any auctions for a week," she says, "they'll write...
...community angle is one that eBay executives work hard to promote. Users find electronic newsletters catering to their obsessive interests, visit chat rooms where buyers and sellers can get acquainted and swap tips, drop in at a cafe where they can catch up on the latest community news. Everywhere you turn--or click--you find the chipper, boosterish tone of a small-town newspaper--that is, a small-town paper with almost 8 million writers and readers...
Moreover, eBay has exposed America as a nation of collectors. Matchbook covers, cast-iron witches' cauldrons, Pez dispensers, pneumatic grease pumps from the 1920s, Three Stooges memorabilia--you name it, some American somewhere collects it. "We define ourselves by our stuff," says Robert Thompson, president of the Popular Culture Association and a Syracuse University professor who specializes in the study of collectibles. In a democracy, with everyone theoretically equal, people want to be different. We don't have a caste system; we've never had a blood-line aristocracy. We've distinguished ourselves by our cars, by the clothes...