I Told You So, An eBay Tale

I'm missing the Fluttershy bank from my collection of F.A.B. Starpoint banks. If there had been any at the local Walmart, I never saw them, only the Twilight Sparkle, Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash banks. Since the Mint insists on flooding us with way too many commemorative coins, I have piles of them and not enough coin banks in which to dump them. So I was shy one bank.

There are a few on eBay, most of which remain listed for months and years. Too many people ask for way too much for the stuff they might actually be trying to sell. The shipping fees don't help. I eventually found one priced low enough to be worth the risk of buying from an online garage sale. It was missing a pad on the bottom but I can live with that.

I left this note for the seller when I bought it: "These My Little Pony banks are fragile, especially the wings, and the eBay delivery service is not gentile. Please bubble wrap or cushion the bank all over, leave no part naked and pressed to the box. Thank you!"

It had not been packed properly. I could hear the broken pieces rattling in the box when I picked it up off my front porch. I waited until this morning to open the box by the light of day. The pony had padded splints on the wings but otherwise it was merely sandwiched between two layers of bubblewrap in a small box. The bank had shattered at an unpadded point pressed against the box and the pieces are too small to glue back together. The "fragile special handling" USPS sticker was not a replacement for proper padding and packing. It never is. Also, since this is eBay, the US post office delivered to eBay and eBay used Intelcom (gig workers courier service) to finish the delivery.

To top off the disastrous packing job, I discovered that a wing had been snapped off and reglued (messily). There was no mention of a glued broken wing in the description, the pictures in the listing show a bank that does not have a broken wing and I did not get a message about the wing from the seller at any point in time. Barring magic, elves or Photoshop, it looks like the wing got broken and glued back after it was listed and before it was mailed.

So the packing job was shoddy but the surprise reglued wing was dishonest. I couldn't know that the seller was going to ignore my request for a proper packing job (although that happens often enough) but if I'd known it had a broken wing, I would not have bought it. It cost $35 US all told, over half of that was for shipping. I sent pictures and a note to the seller telling them that they really need to improve their packing. If the package isn't packed to withstand a two story drop, you're doing it wrong.

That broken wing is just the icing on the cake.