Jon McKnight

A toast to eBay's blind eye!

People flogging alcohol in direct contravention of eBay's rules must be tempted to drink a toast to the online auction site's apparent willingness to turn a blind eye to their activities.

eBay says, very clearly, that alcohol must not be sold through its site because it's a prohibited item.

Yet bottles of Champagne, for instance, are frequently listed on eBay with apparent impunity.

The sellers know they mustn't do it, so they pretend that it's actually the bottle the Champagne's in that makes it valuable and the fact it happens to contain alcohol is merely coincidental.

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink... and eBay says no more.

Here's an extract from eBay's rules:

eBay does not permit the sale of alcoholic beverages, except for certain sales of collectable containers. Further, non-UK members may not conduct alcohol sales with any eBay member residing in the United Kingdom.

Breaches of this policy may result in a range of actions, including:
Listing cancellation
Limits on account privileges
Account suspension
Forfeit of eBay fees on cancelled listings
Loss of PowerSeller status

Why does eBay have this policy?

eBay wants to ensure its sellers and buyers comply with their legal obligations. Since the sale of certain alcoholic products is prohibited by law, regulated, or may cause harm to eBay or its members, sellers may not list the specified alcoholic products on eBay.

Look, then, at an item being listed at time of writing - item number 16016424161.

It's described, somewhat semi-literately, thus:

3 litre bottle Moet Et Chandon Jereboam Champagne full. This auction is for a Jereboam bottle of Moet Et Chandon. Its 3 litres and is the equivalent of 4 regular bottles of Moet. It has been stored correctly in my cellar for the past 18 months so should be in A1 condition. To not breach eBay rules the value is in the collectable bottle, not its contents as I cannot list alcohol on eBay.

This is nonsense. The seller knows it, prospective buyers know it and eBay knows it. Or at least, eBay should know it, because I've reported it to them as a prohibited item.

But that was more than 48 hours ago. And the item's still there, gathering bids.

Are the bidders offering so much money for an empty bottle? Unlikely, because display bottles (sealed but empty bottles of Champagne) do not fetch anything like the money being offered for this item.

Could it be that they're bidding so much because the bottle is, as admitted by the vendor, full of Champagne?

And if, as the vendor says, the value is "in the collectable bottle, not its contents", why does he tell us that it's been stored correctly in his cellar for 18 months. If the alcohol inside was so unimportant and not a factor in the sale, its condition would be irrelevant.

So what became of the report I made to eBay through the proper channel?

Not a lot, it seems. The automated replies reporters receive includes the following get-out clause: "Please be aware that, as it's important that eBay maintains member privacy, we can't share details of the action we take."

So that's all right then...

Jon McKnight
Author of Sort The Bastards!

Very little help... at Tesco

I could have been dreaming, of course, but I'm pretty sure I was wide awake when I walked into Tesco at Roborough in Plymouth at one o'clock in the morning recently.

The doubts only persist because, having finished my shopping, I found that the only three checkouts open were unattended but marked as Self Service.

A nearby supervisor explained that I had to scan all the items myself, put them on the conveyor belt, then pack them.

Astonished, I asked if I would receive a discount, as the price of the items already included the cost of staffing yet I was being forced to work as a checkout operator myself.

No chance, apparently.

Having spent 29 years in the workplace trying to avoid working as a checkout operator, I was given a crash course by the supervisor who was helpful (but not helpful enough to sit there and scan my items herself).

Some items wouldn't be scanned, whatever I did; the machine barked orders at me, telling me to do it faster or slower; and it was constantly scolding me to take particular items off the conveyor belt.

One item didn't scan but made it to the other end of the conveyor belt before the machine deigned to notice. But we couldn't be sure which item it was that we hadn't paid for.

I called the supervisor again and she said that if I thought she was going to go through my many bags of shopping to find out which item had slipped through, I had another think coming.

I protested that I did wish to pay for everything, but the machine wouldn't let me - and I didn't want to be stopped at the door and detained for trying to leave with goods I hadn't paid for.

She told me not to worry, as it was more trouble than it was worth to go back through all the transactions to find the item.

But I did leave with one more thing - a feeling of resentment that a store as immensely profitable as Tesco could get away with forcing customers to become checkout operators themselves and suffer the embarrassment of being remonstrated with by a machine that had such an inflexible and domineering attitude.

If Tesco expect us to do the job ourselves, they should include a heavy discount on the goods to reflect the fact that they're not having to pay a human to do the job we customers expect them to do.

Unless they're cynically exploiting us and simply don't care about their customers at that time of the morning...

Jon McKnight
Author of Sort The Bastards!

Disastrous domains, No 1

It had to happen. The unfortunate omisson of apostrophes from the range of characters permitted in domain names means the resulting run-together words can appear ambiguous.

Today's example of a domain name that can be read two ways - and who am I to guess which is correct? - is the following: www.sainsburyswine.co.uk

Do they mean Sainsbury's Wine... or Sainsbury Swine?

Jon McKnight
Author of Sort The Bastards!