For the price of a pack

Looking at my purchase history, I see that I've now only bought five things on eBay so far this year. I know that I didn't buy very much on there last year either, but unless something changes in the next few months, I'll be setting a new personal record for fewest eBay purchases in a calendar year.

Between the lack of items being listed, and the stupid high prices of those that are, I just don't have much incentive to look for things on there anymore. I still get my daily saved search emails from them, 90% of which I can disregard without even opening thanks to them showing the items price in the title. And as far random searching goes, I'm down to about once a month on that. Not bad, considering there was a time not too many years ago when I'd be on there every other day searching for this or that. I may not care for them too much as a people, but in some ways I'm very grateful to the boom crowd, as they've given me back some of my free time. As an aside, I recently learned how to do Sudoku, and a lot of this free time that I speak of has been going towards that. My time spent reading has really dropped off in the last couple of weeks, as I've found that those puzzles are quite addictive. I suppose though, if one has to get addicted to something, there's far worse things to fall under the spell of (like eBay). So, yeah, random searches are down. Searches with a purpose are way down too, although I do sometimes still see something on the blogs, something that I like, and go see if there's another availble somewhere for a decent price; something like this....

I'm pretty sure that either Eric or Fuji posted about this 2021 Archives Gene Tenace autograph sometime in the last few months. Apologies if it was someone else though, I tend to only associate those two guys with Gene Tenace. Not being one to keep up with the latest releases, I usually only find out about new things after seeing them on the blogs. Such was the case with this card. After whoever's post, I knew that I had to have one, so I went looking for one of my own. And after just a few short weeks, I was able to have one in hand.

Google tells me that the average price for a hobby pack of 2021 Archives is $6 (seems like a lot, but what do I know), which is almost exactly how much this card cost after the shipping and tax were added in. Considering that I didn't have to go anywhere to get it, nor did I have to buy any packs to try and get it, I feel like six bucks was a pretty good deal.

Having not been collecting at the time, I had to look it up to find out this card is on the 2002 Topps design, which, with it's orange-ish gold border, works really well with the photo of Gene that was used. Speaking of 2002, if I didn't know any better I'd have swore that I had gone back to then to make this purchase, as it took all of two days to get here. Granted, it was only coming from one state over (GA), but still, two days, when's the last time you got an eBay purchase in two days? The USPS hasn't moved mail like that since probably... 2002!

As far Gene Tenace goes, I recently added what I have of him to a binder. I knew that I didn't have a lot of his cards, as it turned out though, my collection of him is even more meager than I had previously thought. I think I'm gonna have to try and do something about that.