Claudia O'Keefe

Today the number of items listed daily has jumped to more than 700,000. If you add in eBay’s newly acquired company, Half.com, this figure soars to over 1.5 million items listed daily. Gone from eBay’s press releases is the number of its auctions that end successfully. EBay no longer congratulates its users for listing with them, or tells them that most of its items sell.

EBay is a monster. It’s a closed economy in hyperdrive, astonishing in its power to change, roll over or flatten anything or anyone in its path. Take a quick trip to eBay’s discussion boards and you will find desperate sellers running scared like me. We are being forced out by competition, both from new hordes of sellers eager to cash in and from the scores of higher priced brand-name auctioneers that eBay is cutting deals with. Our profit margins have declined to the point that one night of eBay technical problems, an event that is becoming more and more common, can send us to the edge of bankruptcy.

It all started out so innocently. I was a willing, eager fool for eBay. Three years ago, I needed some extra cash and I had a lot of extra stuff sitting around in closets that I hadn’t even looked at in years. What’s the use of taking boxes of stuff I never use from house to house and apartment to apartment each time I move, I asked myself? Wouldn’t it be spiritually wiser to rid myself of these material trappings, these halfhearted collections and unread books, and in the process pay off some bills?

That’s just what I did. I couldn’t believe it. The money people paid on eBay for my junk! I didn’t sell bad junk. Nothing broken or fake or cheesy. Yet to everyone but a collector, it would have been considered junk, the stuff most people pass over at a yard sale. For a week’s work of taking photos, writing snappy descriptions and waiting on horrendous uploads of listings and graphics, I made over $800.

Now to a day trader, $800 is complete and utter chump change; $800 won’t buy you a decent suit. To a woman in her mid-30s with a going-nowhere graphics job that pays $235 a week after taxes, the difference was staggering.

Did I quit the day job? Don’t be stupid. That would have been completely irresponsible. I waited until my second week’s worth of stuff brought me another $725. Then I told my bosses they could take their brain-numbing job designing 25 coupons a night for carpet cleaners and chicken restaurants called Pluck-U, and shove it where the Merry Maids don’t shine.

All went swimmingly until I began to run out of stuff. It took me approximately a month to cleanse my soul of McCoy pottery, Eisenberg costume jewelry and weird old books about the beginnings of Los Angeles. I then had a dilemma. Where could I get more junk to put on eBay?

No problem, I soon discovered. Back then, I was living in the Tampa Bay area. It so happened that people with lots of cool collectibles who had retired to Florida were expiring on a regular basis. All I had to do was open the St. Petersburg Times and there they would be, as many as 10 estate sales listed per weekend.

So I joined the rest of the herd who woke themselves up an hour before dawn from Thursday through Sunday, and not even daring to take time for breakfast or a cup of caffeine, raced from one dead person’s living room to another, pawing over items the surviving relatives either didn’t understand or didn’t appreciate. Competition was fierce, and frequently ugly.

Dealers and pickers, experienced buyers who scavenge sales in order to sell to other dealers who are too lazy, busy or dignified to do it themselves, would frequently become involved in tussles that verged on assault, all so they could be first through the front door. It was essential to be among the first six. Seventh or eighth in and you might as well forget it. Knowledgeable buyers can pick a three-bedroom house clean of anything worthwhile in under a minute. In order for me to score at all, I frequently had to show up an hour before a sale was due to start.

Somewhere along the way, two things happened. First, I noticed that I was really good at knowing what would sell on eBay.

My mother, who lives on Social Security, and can no longer find a job that doesn’t involve greeting people at Wal-Mart, or asking if someone wants mild, hot or fire sauce with their chalupa, soon became my eBay business partner. She is an idiot savant at cleaning “hopeless” antique linens. Except for the idiot part. She’s just pure savant. Nor can anyone begin to touch her jeans hem with a steam iron.

However, she would often try to stop me from buying things I saw.

“Not those!” she’d say, with a grimace, as I picked up Rodney Kent hammered aluminum trays from the 1950s, or Boonton Melmac mixing bowls from the 1960s for a buck apiece. “Who the hell is going to want those?”

“Trust me, Mom,” I’d say. “They’re going to want it about two months from now. Can’t you see the style in it? It’s next up. These people knew design and pretty soon you’re going to see it featured in Martha Stewart.”

She never understood, but always admired my forecasting when a couple of months later whatever I’d chosen would rake in up to 5,000 percent profit, feature articles in Martha notwithstanding.

The second thing I noticed was that the pickers and traditional antique dealers I had done the Filene’s Basement tango with during the previous few months began to disappear.

“Why?” those of us still in line for yard sales would wonder aloud to each other. “Where did they go?”

In their place soon rose a new breed, and we had an answer to our question: eBay sellers. Suddenly they were everywhere, people who knew my secret to success. Rapidly eBay was pushing the traditional, small-time brick and mortar dealers out of business. I knew it was true when I happened to catch someone waiting in line for a juicy sale at the First Methodist Church in Clearwater, singing “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Except their lyrics went, “EBay killed the collectibles store.”

Perhaps at that point I should have rethought my position, seen the writing on the wall, moved on to some other form of employment. Up till then I could confidently walk into an estate sale and know I would be the only one there interested in buying ladies’ 50-year-old nylon, seamed stockings. (Drag queens and fetishists were paying beaucoup for them in the vintage clothing category.) Now I had to look even further and harder for that untapped online auction market.

Instead of quitting, instead of being sensible and realizing that I had pinned my entire well-being, and my mother’s, too, on the service provided by a single Internet company, which at any moment could crash and burn, the victim of a spent fad, I whipped myself into overdrive. I went to so many sales, spent so many hours at the computer, listing items, researching winning bids in a multitude of auction categories, taping Collectible Treasures until if I heard that chirpy theme song one more time I swore I was going to shoot the Prime Star cable box, that my social life completely died out. I began losing my old friends through attrition, yet didn’t take time out to make new ones. How could I? I was now too busy, too harried and suddenly, unexpectedly, too broke to go anywhere or do anything but list, list, list.

What had happened to my world, my great new life, my shiny, aggressively bright dream of self-employment?

Success. That’s what. Not mine, eBay’s.

According to just released third-quarter statistics, today eBay has nearly 19 million registered users, “making us larger than New York City,” the company brags on its announcement board. That’s up from 7.7 million in 1999.

The problem is, if eBay’s 146 percent increase in registered members included mostly bidders, then eBay sellers would be in good shape. But most new members are probably sellers as well.

“There are very few of us who only buy on eBay, from what I can tell,” says Ken Houghton, a consultant for a big-five accounting firm, who was recently able to bid on three copies of the same “scarce” book in auctions all ending the same day.

What does this all mean? For starters, my sense of what might be sellable is no longer a dependable business tool. It served me well, but it simply can’t compete with category after category of once popular and scarce collectibles now saturated with items. One Victorian trade card I bid on and won for $40 a year and a half ago, won’t bring me an opening bid of $2.99 today. A box of vintage postcards and ephemera that would have netted me close to $2,000 a year ago is failing miserably right now. How can it do otherwise? The category Collectibles>Paper>Postcards>Town Views, where I would list most of them, has 41,697 auctions running in it as I type. It would take weeks for a potential bidder to scroll through the 834 pages of listings, let alone click and download each of the 50 auctions to a page.

It’s outright depressing. EBay is like it was in the beginning, only in full-throttle reverse. Categories that made me a living just 10 short months ago have become clogged with product. I’ve long given up on costume jewelry, McCoy and Roseville pottery, tintypes and vintage beads. Our linens used to score big time because of my mother’s talents, but now we’re practically giving the stuff away.

I called eBay to get an official response to my situation. Was it really true? Was the growth of eBay resulting in a monster that was eating its young? But for the most part my worries were dismissed.

“We believe the potential for growth on eBay is very, very strong,” said Kevin Pursglove, a senior director for eBay. “As the trading platform has expanded, as we are attracting more users, it is true that many categories now have more sellers today than they did, say, a year ago, or two years ago. And that is just a natural function of a market place. Of a dynamic market place in which a small group of sellers have demonstrated a very successful ability to sell merchandise, which then attracts other sellers, which by definition will enlarge the market place. In many cases, it brings more bidders, as well.”

But it’s not just the profusion of small-time sellers like me who are flooding the market. Approach the problem of success for the mom and pop eBay seller from a different angle, and the conclusions are still foggy and undrawable. Last year, the value of all goods sold on eBay’s site leapt by 83 percent to $1.4 billion. During the third quarter, the company hosted 68.5 million auctions. This is up 89 percent from the 36.2 million auctions run in the third quarter of 1999.

On the surface this suggests that winning bids almost kept pace with the increase in items listed. But much of the value of those winning bids is actually concentrated in big-ticket items sold by professionals. During the past year eBay has added its Great Collections auctions, and significantly expanded eBay Motors. For the price of a 2001 Ram Dodge pickup and a couple of A. Blanchard Paris street scenes, you could win almost every one of the 9,000 romance fiction auctions running at any time.

Today, eBay has more than 200 online partners, including a recently launched, co-branded Disney site, which sells rare and authenticated Disney memorabilia and artifacts. Some would argue this will bring more Disney fans into the orbit of eBay’s private sellers of the same collectibles, but the danger is there for loyal eBay Disney hounds to be sucked away by this bold new launch. Why buy an animation cel from someone you don’t know, when Disney is there to authenticate theirs for you?

“In the Coin category,” writes CEO Meg Whitman in her quarterly letter to eBay users, “we developed relationships with Heritage Coins, Certified Collectors Group and Collectors Universe. Not only are these companies known and respected in the Coin industry, they also have access to higher priced and hard-to-find items.”

Terrific, I can imagine the poor dealers in the coin category thinking, just what I need. Some hotshot company to make my goods look like vending machine slugs.

“The great majority of business on eBay is still conducted by the smaller users,” declared Pursglove, “and not necessarily conducted by the larger companies that have gotten a little bit more attention over the past year or so.”

Pursglove did concede that the average “Gross Merchandise Sales” (GMS) per user is declining, but he denied vehemently that this was a case of fewer auctions making more money.

“No, no, no. That’s not what we’re saying at all,” says Pursglove. “What we’re saying is that the number of items there is expanding, and as well, the type of items that we now list on eBay are much different than they were a year ago. A year ago, or a year and a half ago, eBay was primarily known as a collectibles trading platform, but now because you do have the small to medium size businesses that sell on eBay, as well as those individuals, you will see an alteration of the average GMS numbers, and the average GMS numbers per user.”

As if added competition is not a serious enough threat to private sellers, the current, monthlong rash of eBay outages and site instability has many sellers livid, so angry the company’s discussion boards become a virtual firestorm of hate and overwrought emotion each night when bidders can’t get in to bid on their auctions and all important search functions go down.

“Fuk you, Fuk you, eBay,” one user messages the board in giant, bolderized type, intentionally misspelling the expletive, perhaps hoping that eBay won’t suspend him or her, or delete the message.

So what is eBay doing for us? Pursglove ticked off a list of new services that he said demonstrated eBay’s commitment to average users.

“There are all sorts of services that we’ve developed for our users over the years to make it much easier for them to sell their items,” said Pursglove. “We have a shipping arrangement through iShip, photo hosting services are now available through iPix. We’ve created a Billpoint credit card service so that when you list your item on eBay, you can literally pay for it within minutes of it being closed down. So you don’t have to wait three or four days to have a check sent to you, another three or four days to have that check clear, and another three or four days to have the item ship. So there are a ton of those services that we continue to offer to our sellers and buyers that are helping the average, everyday user on eBay sell their own merchandise, whether they are a person that might sell five or six items a month, or whether they’re selling a hundred or five hundred items a month.”

For some of us, however, instead of photo hosting services, we’d just like the system to work. The Auction Guild, the Lone Gunman of the online auction world, determinedly monitors and documents it each time eBay bogs, crashes or throws repeated error messages, sometimes even catching the company in lies about its downtime. “The worst problems have been from the third to the 25th of October,” the guild’s Rosalinda Baldwin tells me. Sure enough, a few keystrokes and I’m looking at incident reports of major outages and problems on Oct. 10, 11, 12, 15, 17, 19, 20 and 22, many of which were not fully or, according to the guild, honestly, reported by eBay on its announcements page.

Pursglove disputed some of the Auction Guild’s reports, noting that some of the outside monitoring services may inaccurately record “intermittent problems” as major outages. He stated that there hadn’t been an outage longer than two hours in more than a year.

But on Tuesday, after eBay admitted that it was having difficulties, its shares fell $5.50 to $54.06. They had already been dropping in the wake of the Oct. 10-12 outages. The shares were temporarily juiced up by the company’s third-quarter earnings release on Oct. 19, but have already relinquished what ground they gained. Given that eBay’s normal routine is to release earnings reports on the 25th of the month after the quarter ends, this glowing news, presented early, sounds suspiciously like an attempt to divert attention from known problems.

Like a lot of sellers, eBay’s stock is not of prime importance to me. What hurts me are the 33 out of 50 of my auctions that closed without a single bid last week. Of the 17 items that sold, only three rose above their paltry opening prices. I have less than $100 gross income to show for a 60-hour workweek.

What all of these problems boil down to is more uncertainty and more competition for individual, full-time eBay sellers, the dogged loyalists who helped build eBay up from an auction board for Pez dispensers.

Thursday, there was a court hearing. My mother and I are being evicted because we can’t pay the rent. I know this sounds melodramatic, but unfortunately, it’s true. Earlier this week, eBay cut out when more than half the auctions we had running closed. Last-minute bidders, the most important kind, couldn’t get in to place their bids. We lost money. A lot more than we made. It was a wake-up call.

I can’t go on like this. I will not go on like this. I won’t let my mother, her two dogs and my three cats, Raven, Sparrow and Magpie, who are my family, and depend on me to make certain their world is whole and sane, continue like this. It was a beautiful dream, but a stupendously arrogant one on my part. I fell under the giddy, deep drink of individual Internet commerce, and it has to stop.

It’s a sure bet that eBay will continue to grow, continue to be profitable, to justify its rating as the Motley Fool’s “favorite long-term stock of any valued under $20 billion.” I can’t tell you how relieved I am, however, what an enormous weight off my shoulders it is to finally admit I am done with it. This is one fool the online auction world will have to do without.

I felt backed into a corner, but knew I had to take responsibility for my family’s declining finances. I bit the bullet and applied for the only position available to me: as a waitress serving millionaire politicians and billionaire CEOs. During a season working at this playground for the well-heeled set, I received a crash course on what it means to go from a quality job to one of the newly made service-industry jobs so often touted by our leaders as replacements.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not some pampered Cinderella stepsister who suddenly had her charge cards yanked away and had to do her first honest day of toil. I’ve held survival jobs before and this was not my first stint as a waitress. As recently as 2000, the “new economy” threw me for a loop that required a tough scramble for employment. I believed I knew what to expect when I fell back to the lower rungs.

But this job was different. I discovered life at the bottom surprisingly altered in just the short time between the end of the dot-com boom and the present, and I found my employer to be the perfect embodiment of an ongoing shift in corporate culture. Policies at the resort were indicative of changes that are transpiring at companies across the country. Wring every minute of work you can out of your employees without paying them for it. Increase profits and cut costs at their expense. Keep low-wage employees solidly in their place.

After applying, I was fingerprinted to rule out criminal activity in my past. Two distressingly large locks of my hair were snipped from my head for drug testing. My blood was drawn, and I was X-rayed in case I had TB.

Then came orientation. Human Resources handed us a demoralizing set of rules that nearly all the resort’s more than 1,200 employees had to follow, excluding midlevel and top management. Employees weren’t allowed to eat in any of the hotel’s restaurants or to use any of its facilities, whether or not we could pay for them. We couldn’t vacation there for an hour, let alone a week, couldn’t have our hair cut by the salon, bowl in the bowling alley, swim in the swimming pools, buy a movie ticket, partake of the restorative waters in the spa, or be seen on the grounds when not on shift. Guests often asked me what the food tasted like. I had no idea.

“We don’t want our guests to be confused or their experience here compromised,” went the official explanation for these rules.

Just one exception to these rules existed. We could shop in a small corridor of stores on the bottom floor, but only if we dressed ourselves in attire similar to that of the clientele we served. I tried this once and felt painfully exposed after managers on duty spotted me and carefully followed my progress from shop to shop. I guess my Ann Taylor slacks and Coach bag didn’t cut it.

There was nowhere to store personal belongings during my shift, a way of discouraging me from bringing them onto the grounds. For the first time in my life, I had to leave my purse at home and stuff my driver’s license and car key into a pocket of a polyester uniform. The one time I forgot and walked in with a handbag on my shoulder, I was rewarded with a search by security guards when I exited.

I could have shrugged off all of this, though, if it hadn’t been for the degrading way management and guests treated me. Guests weren’t just rude and demanding, a common negative in hospitality jobs anywhere. These guests had power, knew they had power, and used it as a club, with management championing their cause.

“What do you mean you don’t serve Oban? You had it the other night at the golf club. Can’t you go get some? Oh, is it really half a mile away? That’s OK, I’m not in any hurry. I’ll wait.”

I’ll wait — which meant that they expected me to dash off on a mile-long round trip for a glass of their favorite scotch, while the rest of my tables suffered my absence. It didn’t matter that we had two shelves of excellent single malts within reach. If they couldn’t get the one they wanted, they wouldn’t be happy. They were also allowed to drink without fear of ever being cut off, some becoming so falling-down drunk that they had to be hauled away to their rooms in wheelchairs.

Once a woman spent an entire night telling me that next morning she would be phoning her friend, the hotel’s CEO, to have me fired because I’d dared to card her 21-year-old daughter. I had a couple who wouldn’t remove their bare, dirty feet from the table where I needed to set their lunch and kept me standing there, hot plates burning my fingers, until I gave up and hauled over a second table for their food. I recall a child projectile vomiting over not just one, but two tables. Instead of apologizing, the parents complained when wait staff didn’t clean up the mess immediately. (Management policy was to phone for housekeeping to deal with bodily fluids.) Twice during my tenure guests removed bandages from open sores on their bodies and thrust them into my hand, exposing me to direct contact with their blood and bits of gooey scab.

“Throw that away, won’t you?” one said to me without even looking up.

Management took the-customer-is-always-right principle to new heights. It didn’t matter how humiliating the task. If a guest asked it of us, we were expected to comply.

One of my least favorite memories involves a fellow waiter. He was stooped and gray, but he worked harder than anyone else in my department. I’d never seen him bothered by anything. Then on a fall afternoon a party of golfing buddies came into the resort’s sports bar. From their last visit, they remembered that he knew some good stories about a famous golfer.

“Tell him to come over here,” the men said. “We want him to entertain us.”

They kept him standing at their table for round after round, putting on an impromptu show. Watching his grinning but humble manner and age-distorted body, I felt like I’d been thrown back hundreds of years in time to see a jester amuse a bored group of courtiers. When he finally returned to the bar his eyes spoke volumes about weariness and the fragility of personal dignity.

Like people who speak extra loudly around the blind, the privileged communicated with me as if I had the I.Q. of a canapé. Once when I used the word “synonym” in conversation with a guest, he and everyone else in the party broke out laughing. “My God, she just used a word with three syllables,” his wife said.

On another night I approached a table in the dining room.

“Are you the Epsilon who’s going to serve us tonight?” asked one of the men at the table.

He was making a reference to the classic novel “Brave New World,” by Aldous Huxley, in which a future society is divided into strict castes according to intelligence and capabilities. The names of the castes, from the top down, are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and at the absolute bottom, Epsilon, the semi-morons. He didn’t think I would understand his reference, and exchanged amused glances with a friend, enjoying his joke.

“No, actually I’m an Alpha in disguise,” I told him. “I’ll be happy to take your order, however.”

Not all guests were unpleasant or tactless. In fact, the nicer ones outnumbered the snobbish and mean, but they didn’t make up for the other side of the equation, management.

Listening to my fellow employees I received the distinct impression that the hotel had once been a desirable place to work. “People used to fight to get in here,” I was told one evening when the waiters felt like talking. It was only in recent years that they’d witnessed deterioration in their working environment and incomes. Most employees equated these changes with the arrival of a new corporate team that swooped in to begin subdividing vast acres of previously unspoiled land belonging to the resort. My co-workers saw the resort become a selling tool for $300 million in land-sales profits, instead of being a destination in and of itself. Their biggest concern was that once every last lot was gone, the resort might be sold off and the hotel part of it shut down for several months, thus ending their union contracts.

“Then they’ll reopen it under a new name and hire some of us back at half what they pay now,” ran a common refrain.

Management did nothing to dispel their worries, instead intensifying them by adopting further policy changes to maximize profit and productivity at the expense of the lower ranks.

“It used to be we made money from …” or “They didn’t used to make us do …” or “Well, looks like we won’t be able to do that anymore,” were phrases I often heard from my co-workers. Tipping opportunities and benefits began to erode as management retooled departments to shift money that hourly workers would have earned into cost savings and new revenue streams for the hotel.

In my department a new bar was built that could be serviced by two waiters, one acting as bartender. At first the waiters were excited by the hotel’s spin on it, and I was pleased, too, as the new bar had created the job I now had.

“An extra bar means extra tips for you to split on payday,” management told us.

Then two months later came the bad news. Since just after Prohibition, the lounge had always employed a year-round staff of waiters. Some had been there for 30 years or more and were favorites with the guests. Now the lounge would close for six months of the year, and most of the staff would be laid off, because the new bar could serve just as many during that time with only one waiter and one bartender.

Cost efficient, definitely, yet I dreaded those 11- to 12-hour shifts at the new bar. I was never given more than one 10-minute break per day and even that was pointless. There was no break area. To sit down anywhere in the hotel’s public areas, even in civilian clothes on days off, risked a write-up in your employee jacket. On slow days, when I wasn’t running back and forth through three grand lobbies, across two sweeping terraces, a piano room, game room, and multiple reading parlors, as the only person to serve a waitstation the size of a football field, I was expected to always be in guest view, standing at Buckingham-guard attention for hours. Before coming to the resort I’d never thought that I would look forward to using a restroom just for the chance it afforded me to sit down. (Management later reconsidered its cost-cutting plan when it met with mixed results; it changed the number of months the lounge would be closed from six to five and agreed to open it up on the busiest weekends, giving workers back some of the hours they had lost.)

I was amazed at the arrogance of the corporation when it came to employee relations. Most supervisors used intimidation as their principal management tool. I felt especially sorry for the shuttle-bus drivers who routinely worked 16-hour days with no break. If they ran inside to use the bathroom, a supervisor would usually be there to question what they were doing.

The drivers worked such long hours because not long after I started all nonmanagement employees were banned from parking anywhere on the resort’s thousands of acres. They were to be bused in from a newly built lot near downtown. Whereas before, local workers could count on a five-minute commute door to door, they were now required to spend 40 minutes to an hour of unpaid time waiting for and riding a shuttle bus onto and off the property. No one explained why. Rumors circulated that it was because the corporation wanted to develop our former parking lots behind the laundry into luxury homes, but in the absence of an explanation the message sent was that same old refrain: Sorry, you’re not good enough to drive onto hotel property.

I don’t consider myself a liberal, and in fact I was raised as a conservative. But it doesn’t take the countless studies that have been completed in recent years to demonstrate to me that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening as the ground falls out from under the middle class. All I needed was six months on the receiving end. Of the 2.3 million workers who have lost their white-collar paychecks over the last three years due to outsourcing, productivity gains and, as some pundits claim, a shortage of start-up capital, I’m certain many have learned the same demeaning lesson I did when forced downward by the scarcity of quality jobs.

I wonder how many of us imagined when we left school to embark on the bright and shining futures heralded by our graduation ceremonies that we would be staring down our 30s, 40s and 50s as minimum-wage earners?

Thankfully I’ve moved on to more rewarding and pleasant work, but my season among the chronically underemployed provided me with a stark reality check. Don’t fool yourself. Even winners are vulnerable in today’s job market.