Important Thoughts 4.0

My important thought for today is: be careful when shopping on eBay. Now I'm not saying that you should need to worry about getting scammed out of your money -- that's impossible on eBay; their security is too good. You do need to worry about spending too much money while shopping on eBay. The creators of eBay were very wise when they made shopping into a game. I like to win games. Winning games is fun and harmless. I also like to win auctions. The difference between games and auctions on eBay is that when you win an auction, you have to pay money. It's like winning and losing at the same time. To save innocent eBayers from the pitfalls of auction shopping, I came up with this list of Five Safe Shopping Practices:

1. Don't keep bidding on an item until you're the highest bidder if you're just curious to see how much money the person before you bid. This is dangerous; you might end up having to pay that much money.
2. Don't bid on an item just to get it onto your "My eBay" page. Choose "Watch this Item" instead.
3. Don't bid on a lot of items just to see if there's a limit to how many items you can bid on at one time, because I can tell you right now that there isn't.
4. Don't look for Back to the Future action figures -- you'll just be wasting your time because there aren't any Back to the Future action figures on eBay.
5. Don't go onto eBay with the purpose of getting one item (for example, one white leather purse) and then bid on more than one (for example, seven white leather purses), thinking that at least you'll get one of them -- you might end up getting all of them (for example, seven white leather purses).