eBay's Grilled Cheese Diet
The Last Liberal
OUR TAKE
eBay's Grilled Cheese Diet
By Rick Aristotle Munarriz (TMF Edible)
November 18, 2004
You can't blame eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY). It has to deal with folks trying
to sell everything from body parts to fake props of historical
notoriety to Milli Vanilli CDs. So when it saw Diana Duyser trying to
sell a grilled cheese sandwich that she claimed bore the likeness of
the Virgin Mary, it cancelled that auction to nip the hoax in the bud.
Yet Duyser was serious. She had kept the sandwich, after taking one
errant nibble, as a religious relic for 10 years and she had every
intention of handing it over to the highest bidder. So this week eBay
changed its mind and let Duyser relist her sandwich.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=19270&item=5535890757&rd=1
Here is why eBay -- and just as importantly the eBay community -- is
so great. More than 800,000 people have checked out Duyser's auction,
and enterprising sellers on the popular auction site are taking
advantage of that traffic.
More than 200 auctions on the site include Grilled Cheese Virgin Mary
in their title. While the first batch of piggyback listings may have
been either malicious (such as a Virgin Mary steak or a sandwich with
a smiley face) or just ploys to draw attention (by tacking on the word
NOT in the title, then the actual item), you have to admire the next
wave. Enter the search terms and you see folks selling t-shirts
bearing the likeness of the sandwich and someone even put up an
original watercolor painting of the now famous item.
I imagine that even the quieter auction halls of Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO)
and Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) have a token related item or two. What? You
didn't know that those sites offer consumer auctions? Well, that's
just a testament to eBay's ubiquity then, isn't it?
What's the oddest thing that you have ever seen on the eBay auction
block? Have you ever considered the site as a great place to go
holiday shopping? All this and more -- in the eBay Discussion Board.
Only on Fool.com.
Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz is a satisfied eBay user and
can't remember the last time he had a really good grilled cheese
sandwich. Wait. No. He still can't remember. He does not own shares
in any of the companies mentioned in this story, and he is a member of
the Rule Breakers analytical team, seeking out the next great growth
stock early in its defiance.
--
"Terrorism" isn't the enemy: George W Bush is!
http://lastliberal.org
Voting Republican makes baby Jesus cry!
Android Cat
> http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2004/mft04111802.htm
>
> OUR TAKE
>
> eBay's Grilled Cheese Diet
>
> By Rick Aristotle Munarriz (TMF Edible)
> November 18, 2004
Bah! It's just a piece of R6, with cheese.
--
Ron of that ilk.