Pensioners Twenty Percent Off!

Originally uploaded by markltb.

If you want to buy a Pensioner, it looks like this is the right shop for you! On Wednesdays, that is.

Whirlitzer In Habbitat

Originally uploaded by markltb.

On Regent Street in London there is a new-ish Habitiat that is in an old Cinema. The building was used as a church for about thirty years but was a Cinema before that, and apparenly had the first ‘Whirlitzer’ Organ in the UK.

Habitat have done an excellent job instalilng their store whilst respecting the history and character of the building, and have even retained the organ in working condition!

Thus when shopping for household goods we were kept entertained by the “oh I do like to be beside the seaside” air of the Whirlitzer.

Kingly Court, off Carnaby Street

Originally uploaded by markltb.

Just off Carnaby Street in London is Kingly Court, which has been reborn as a mini shopper’s paradise. Today when I popped in I saw that they had erected their roof, which is rather funky.

It was quite bright so my camera phone couldn’t actually take this picture in one go – I have taken two separate pictures, one of the roof and one of the people, and combined them with much photoshop munging (Noise Ninja, Lens Correction and then some layer masking).

I’m pretty happy with the result, even for a camera phone.

So, good news is, we’ve exchanged contracts on the new flat and move in on the 4th October – not long!

Even better I netted far more from my ebay sales than I was expecting. They nearly paid for a dishwasher – whoo hooo! That’s not too shabby at all. Those have been posted off now as well, so it’s pretty much all done bar the getting feedback.

We’ve booked the movers (two men + van so Bobble doesn’t have to put her back out again), ordered appliances, let lots of people know I’m moving via iammoving.com and started packing – so lots of things are in hand!

However, every silver lining has a cloud:

* BT can’t set up my phone as the current people have a non-BT phone and haven’t told them to cancel it yet, muppets! So I’m chasing that up.

* main annoyance is that I’m apparently allergic to antiseptic cream... had a big scratch on my neck that I wanted to treat and it’s now gone all allergic and yucky. So now I have another cream to put on it – hopefully I won’t be allergic to the second one, nooo! No idea how that happened. Allergies suck!

The impending move has led me to do some major cleaning out of things I’ve been hoarding. I’ve (possibly foolishly) decided to go down the ebay route as opposed to ‘charity shop’ or even throwing things away. I kind of like ebay as a ‘recyler’ of old stuff, at least it goes to someone who wants it, which is nice.

There’s just one problem: ebaying about 30 items just saps your will to live because it takes sooo long!

I’d even been prepared and got a template set up an everything, but it’s still taken three hours. At least an hour of that was waiting for ebay pages to load…

Just as well we have some lovely wine to drink! Good lordy I need a rest now…

I’ve been meaning to write something about this for a while and as I’m about to put a pretty large number of things on ebay due to the mega clear-out of cupboards this weekend, I thought now was the time!

Ebay can be fantastic, but also very frustrating. Probably the most annoying thing that can happen is to lose an auction right at the last minute to a ‘sniper’ who bids a penny more than you in the last ten seconds. There are a few ways to try avoid this – reloading the page frantically, employing sniping software or a web service yourself. But the best way of beating the snipers is with psychology!

The important thing to remember about ebay is that really it is not an auction in the traditional sense. It’s not a market place, and there is no haggling. Selecting the appropriate bid price is vital, not to ensure that you aren’t out-bid, but to ensure your own happiness.

Here’s the recommendation, and I’ll explain why afterwards: always bid your geniune maximum price. Before you confirm the bid, think how you would feel if someone bid a penny more in the last minute? Would that really annoy you? If it would, then you probably haven’t really put your maximum bid down, you’ve put down what you would optimisitcally like to pay for it. Your geniune maximum price is the cut off point where you would happily be outbid.

The advantage of bidding your maximum is twofold; firstly, if you are outbid, you shouldn’t mind so much – it is geniunely more than you would have paid. Secondly, you have made the other bidder pay more than you wanted to. I think the real annoyance in losing an auction is when it goes for a price that you would have paid if only the page had refreshed faster / you weren’t away from your desk / the computer hadn’t crashed / etc.

Bidding correctly means you should only ever have to bid once, so no frantic page reloading in the last minute – you’ve either won the item, or someone else wanted to pay more for it. Really, it is a simple as that. The hard part is knowing exactly how much the maximum you want to pay for something is. We’re just not used to thinking about pricing in this way, usually you try to find the lowest price possible, not the highest! But the key thing here is that if you bid in this way, eBay’s software works for you, not against you – you will only pay slightly more than the next highest bidder. The maximum price you bid probably isn’t what you’re going to pay.

Another handy thing with psychologically correct bidding is that you can – and should – do it as early as possible. Remember that if two people bid the same, ebay will award the item to the earlier bidder. So it does pay to get in there early. Personally I always forget to do things I put off until later, so this is also just more convenient to bid on something when you see it.

With that said, there is one final tip to make your bids more likely to win: never bid a round number – it is too easy for someone to bid a few pence more in a last minute snipe. Instead choose a random number for the pennies, to confuse snipers.

But really the main tip is to spend time thinking about how you would feel if you lost the auction, and set your bid price accordingly. My ebaying has been much happier since I worked that out!