Black Friday? Cyber Monday?
How about Sofa-Shopping Sunday?
The internet is not quite all just about likes, selfies, porn & cats caught on video. It has unquestionably become the go-to place to browse & shop...especially for many time pressed individuals, & equally for those who do not enjoy the 'push & shove' of shoulder to shoulder urban shopping, especially Christmas shopping. But are the corporations & big business squeezing the genuinely original, different & original to the very margins, even on the internet.
Personally, I tend to do 99% of my shopping in front of a reasonable size screen, in a comfy chair, armed with copious mugs of coffee, snacks & my tobacco (Yes, I still smoke at home & I can't do that in shops!). Definitely, an advocate of Sofa Shopping Sunday.
Call me old fashioned, but I still like eBay auctions. Although the belting bargain basement 0.99p acquisitions to be had a few years ago are fewer & far between. The style of eBay shopping trends having changed away from auction format to that of 'buy-it-now'.
I still crawl through the auction listings, basically because I cannot be bothered (with the type of things I'm looking for), of having to filter out 100's of 1,000's of often poor quality Chinese items in the Buy-it-now. That said, ebay seems to be regaining some of its former popularity. Hopefully it has at last stopped trying to be just like Amazon & may encourage back some of the quirkiness & individuality which made ebay so much fun in the past.
I've tried etsy & been monumentally disappointed with it. The etsy expectation to constantly & I DO MEAN CONSTANTLY, tinker, fiddle, alter, change, adjust, & manipulate as a seller the titles, SEO & descriptions of the same product, again & again & again.
There is something broken with the esty search methods. Many of the sellers which attracted me to etsy in the first place have either gone, left or are un-locateable under the morass of designed/ but Chinese-made bangles, beads, baubles, jewelry, & sugar/saccharine coated sweetness on etsy - sufficient to induce a diabetic coma just looking at it. Hurrrumph!
I seldom buy new tech, clothes, or new fashion items. Especially not 'designer' clothes made in their multiple thousands in far eastern factories by persons on weekly wages barely more than Western countries hourly minimum wage. I have never quite understood the mentality of paying more for an item of clothing for its label, where the punter is PAYING a huge multi-national company (which probably avoids its tax obligations) to advertise the corporate product for them - madness?
Vintage, antique, obsolete & sometimes - the unloved = quirky, strange & bizarre are still items of choice for the Kuriologist both in their creation & acquisition.
