Back up to speed...

Last week's attempts to staff the store exhausted me completely. I did better today when you consider that, from shortly after opening until about 5 pm, there wasn't a total of more than 5 minutes without someone at the counter requiring service. Drew and I finally got a bite to eat around 3 pm, and that was between customers. After 5, the traffic nearly died, except for people trying to get me to sell them postage after postal business hours (See the signs! Count the signs! Read the words on the signs!) or postmark their IRS payments for the 15th (a definite no-no). Such people vex the heck out of me, although I understand where they're coming from... somewhat.

Despite the full day at the store, I am not numbingly bone-weary (although I must say, I'm not feeling too spunky, either!). Tomorrow, the local food coop we belong to has levied a couple of hours of our family's time, so Drew will go over and help them sort the monthly shipment for a couple of hours, to keep our dues paid. Hopefully, I'll be able to handle the store by myself for that time.

* * *My attempt to snipe that copy of CorelDraw 9 on eBay was successful. I got the package for about $140, shipping included. For those not familiar with the concept of bid sniping here's how it works:

Imagine you've found something on eBay that you want to bid on, but there are 3 days left in the auction. The way the rules work, if the item is currently at, say, $5.00, you can state the maximum price you're willing to pay, and the eBay automated system will only increment your bid enough to keep you in the winner's circle, until and unless someone bids more than your maximum.

So say you enter a bid of $20. Once it's registered, the current price will be something like $5.50, with you as the high bidder and reflecting the minimum bid increment on eBay (I may be wrong as to the actual amount - I think it's 50 cents for something in the $5 range - but the principle remains).

In any event, a day later, someone else (call this person X) sees this item and bids $6. Thanks to eBay's bidding engine, X is immediately "outbid" by you, and the price stands at $6.50 (with you the top bidder). X is willing to bid again, and bids $7. Again, X finds out he's been outbid (by you) and the bid is now $7.50. After another few bids, X drops out, but the price is now $15.50, to you. Nobody else bids, and you win the item, for $15.50.

Now consider the snipe alternative. If you withhold your $20 bid until the last minute, then if everything else stays the same (X finds the item and is willing to bid $8 on it; the bid stands at $5.50, to X, for all but the last few seconds of the auction). If, with 10 seconds left in the auction, you enter with your $20 bid, you get the item, at the maximum bid plus the minimum increment, i.e., for $8.50.

I'll not forget the first time I fell "victim" to a snipe bid, where Galina and I were outbid on a Russian Impressionist painting in the last 7 seconds of the bid.

There are, of course, no guarantees. X might have been willing to pay up to $30 for the item in question, in which case, X would have won, but at your $20 plus the minimum increment. In the case of the CorelDraw package, the price at the time I bid was something like $122, and my maximum snipe bid was $149.

Anyway, I've just paid for the package, and hope to get it soon. Techology be wunnerful, eh?

* * *This morning's Wall Street Journal had an interesting item:

"In the past week, France made it clear it would look after its own interests first, with French Prime Minister Hean-Pierre Raffarin dismissing the rules underpinning Europe's currency as obscure 'accounting equations.' The European Central Bank warned that unless France and Germany limit their surging budget deficits, as European Union rules require, the credibility of the euro could be damaged. The Netherlands threatened to sue the European Commission - the EU's budget watchdog - to make sure it requires the big countries to follow the rules they themselves wrote."

While France appears to be intent on again pursuing its own national interest with a sophisticated (and unequaled) disregard of agreements it is party to (and indeed, of agreements it claims to spearhead), one wonders whether Estonia, which voted to joint the EU recently, will be able to thumb its nose at Brussels and assert the free market measures it has implemented in recent years, or whether it, for example, will be forced to kowtow to the EU’s insistence that it reintroduce the agricultural subsidies that Tallinn’s free market pioneers scrapped years ago.

I'm not going to hold my breath... or invest in euros.

Cheers...