Once again I ordered a book from one of Amazon's zShops ("Defense of Duffer's Drift" which I've been on and off looking for years) and the shipping and handling charge is $4. And I just received another book that I ordered with a S&H of $4 and I look at the postage stamp and the mailing cost was like less than $1. Even with the cost a box you'd think the handling part wouldn't amount to that much.

Think about it. You have a book at a store. The same book online nets the company effective another couple of dollars. What does the extra money pay for? There's a warehouse (for the larger companies) with warehouse machinery and workers. But that costs effectively as much as a large Barnes and Noble has to pay for rent and people, and the warehouse is usually something that would be there anyways for a large company, so it's not as if they built and manned a warehouse just for online orders.

So every company charges S&H and most overcharge quite a bit (better to be safe on the company's side rather than the customer's). And I'm thinking that most warehouse-based mail-order businesses have a higher profit margin than brick and mortar stores without the S&H charge. People just accept it and keep buying (and I'm in that camp too) and as long as people do that it'll continue. Part of it is that it's a pretty small charge and part of it is that that's the way it's been for so long that people don't know how it was before (heck if I know what it was like before).

Just a dumb observation...

I bought the Pearl Harbor Soundtrack, which is pretty good. Almost all of it instrumental music, except for Faith Hill's song (which is great). I had it at gaming Saturday when everybody decided to trash Pearl Harbor. But I don't think anybody else saw it (maybe Donald) so what do their opinions count for? I said before, it's a love story set during a disaster, much like Titanic.

Then they talked about movie of the year, which Pearl Harbor probably won't get (well, it's not as if I thought Titanic deserved it). The room favorite seemed to be for Lord of the Rings, which I thought immediately "nah, that won't win." Later on I thought about it more. It's possible that it might get best movie since it's based on what is now one of the classics of literature.

But seriously, I was looking through all of the Academy Awards and no fantasy movie has won Best Picture (no science fiction movie has won it either). If the movie concentrates more on plot and characterization than special effect battles then it has a chance. I have no idea since I haven't seen any of the previews...

I was looking through eBay, as I'm wont to do when really bored. Actually I was looking through Yahoo Auctions (which is really dead by the way -- Yahoo has a not good auction engine and there are so few things there compared with a year ago) and someone was selling a FASA Star Trek book. And the thing is that this was like the Operations Manual from the basic game, so it's one of three 48 page softcover books and it's listed like any other full-fledged supplement for any unsuspecting bidder to buy.

It just goes to show you that you have to know what you're buying because people will (inadvertently or purposefully) not be very specific and won't mention these things in their posts. I also saw someone selling CD's with the first four seasons of Stargate, one season per CD (in some highly compressed movie format). That had to be illegal.

None of the major auction sites (and by this I mean eBay, Yahoo and Amazon) have implemented any policies to prevent sniping (where people bid with like a minute to go so that they can't be outbid). Now, it's arguable that if you want an item you should have bid higher in the first place, since the engines will match bids until you run out of money. But that seems to lead to people bidding higher than your max, then retracting the bid which drops the max bid to your max. Which is why not that many people bid as much as they can afford.

It'd be easy to have a "auction doesn't close until 5 minutes after the last bid" function which would help, though probably create other problems. I at least don't contribute to the problem by not putting in my first bid on an item if it's closing within the hour. And I usually won't bid on an item if it closes within 24 hours, because otherwise people don't have a fair chance to reply. It's that twisted sense of honor...