Let’s say you buy a hideous green leather YSL jacket on eBay for $320. And it’s listed as: “VTG Yves Saint Laurent Art Deco Cropped Leather Jacket.”
Should you boast that you “found” it on eBay? To my mind, you “bought” it. It was right there for sale and you saw it and you bought it. Maybe if it was listed on eBay as “Crap leather jacket from the 80s” and you RECOGNIZED it as an YSL piece, then you could say you found it on eBay.
Now. If you spent some time in the Jewish Ladies Thrift Shop and while searching through a rack of ugly polyester shit, you find this for $40…
that is actually “finding.” The person I sold it to on eBay for $320 BOUGHT it! I think we were both happy about it, too.
So, what do you think? Do you get any points for buying expensive designer shit on eBay? Is there a difference between “finding” something and “buying” it?
Finding implies work…searching on ebay can be work for neurotic people (like me), but I’d never liken getting a piece on ebay to finding something. That happens at Hoodwill and in thrifts/flea markets where you actively have to dig through racks/piles/mounds/etc.
And YAY to you on the excellent profit margin. =D
If I click on buy now for an item on ebay then I consider that I have bought said item off ebay. If I bid for something then I think I’ve entered a fight. I consider the item to have been won in a battle. Your sale has made a gladiator of the internet very happy.
Only car boots, jumble sales and charity shop rummaging counts as a find.
My Favourite Thing is a peasant blouse with an embroidered square neck that I literally FOUND rummaging through a market stall at Camden Lock. It had a boot print on the front and cost a fiver.
On another note I FOUND a posh cook-book I’ve wanted for ages on the pavement, in the rain, near a skip. I’ve given it a wipe and wrapped it up for one of my husband’s Christmas presents. . .
“snapped up” also bothers me.
You can only call a $320 jacket a “find” if you can’t count. As if that wasn’t a big enough problem, the person who bought this jacket is obviously blind too because it’s so fucking ugly.
In my mind, “finding” vs “buying” is a similar argument to “vase” vs “vaaahse.” My mom always said you weren’t allowed to pronounce the word “vase” like “vaaahse” unless you paid over $10 for it. Same holds true here. If it’s a quality/name-brand piece and you are getting it at a bargain price, especially at a thrift store, you’ve “found” the piece. If you’ve acquired that same quality/name-brand piece from eBay or a non-sale rack at a department store or boutique, you’ve “bought” the piece.
I definitely agree with Theresa too – “snapped up” should be banished altogether.
Oh – and EXCELLENT job on the 80% profit on the sale, too!
ha!i think i found who bought your jacket…
http://atlantishome.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/11/two-great-vintage-jackets.html
http://seaofshoes.typepad.com/sea_of_shoes/2009/11/ysl-moschinoalso-losing-my-comment-section.html
FINDING is my favorite!
I hate when sales person, even if selling piles of crap on the market, comes to me with the advice. They ruin it for me, cos’ I love the effort I put in finding. Yes, I’m a die-hard finder, lucky one, too.
All the other stuff I make myself anyway, so I’m a very, very bad BUYER.
There is a difference, for sure. I wonder how would it feel to just go into posh fellow designer shop, get the thing and just pay for it. Something tells me that the rewarding pleasure of finding something useless and making it alive again, would be all gone with a whip of a credit card.
This applies only on fashion, entertainment and interior, when it comes to machines and tools, different rules apply.
I often use them pretty interchangeably- I go rummaging through secondhand bookshops pretty often, where looking through piles and piles of books for what you want is quite a job. It’s a little bit of an achievement to find a 1950s edition of a Nancy Mitford book hidden under a pile of other stuff for a friend who wanted it. But I wouldn’t say I ‘found’ a copy of The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest (to take just one example) in the display window of the shop!And that jacket might actually be redeemable if the leather were another shade of green, IMO. But who knows, it might look better in real life.
Like dust, I’m a crappy buyer but that’s because I live in a bloody third world country where the fashion is mostly awful. I haven’t bought any new clothes in over a year now- been living in my dad’s discarded shirts.
Finding=you probably weren’t looking for it, so unless you routinely scan The Bay with random searchwords or take full inventory of categories, you are being far too particular in any given ebay search to “score a find.”
Buy-It-Now braggarts are particularly tedious *JANE AND MOM*. Why even say where you get something if you do a high-priced buy-it-now…it’s false modesty. If you pay in the 300’s for some glorified schmatte with an old guy’s name on it (that he didn’t even design) it’s as good as buying from a typically overpriced bricks-n-mortar vintage store, so shut up about the “finds” and “steals” and enjoy your hoarded rags guilt-and-pseudo-humility-free!
Anything over $100 isn’t a “steal” or a real “find” designer or not. Especially if it’s hideous.
I’d say I need to know where the “Jewish Ladies Thrift Shop” is.
how about – locating? because if you listed it, it really is there to be found hey? xx
I would say that “bought” means you paid money for it. “Found” means you got it for free or literally found it someplace unexpected to find clothing, like “I found this shirt in the hall. No one else claimed it so it’s mine” or “I found a hat on a grocery shelf.” If it’s litter, then it is in the found category.
An interesting question you pose there…. I think the above commentors covered it all but I do think when you’re TRAWLING through eBay going through a list of search terms, ‘finding’ something you end up setting your alarm at 3 in the morning to bid on at the last minute deserves the term ‘found’… it’s all pedantic I guess…