All of you people fretting about someone selling a set of unactivated Travel Bug tags on eBay and frantically emailing each other back in forth in the wee hours of the morning really need to get a life! Personally, I don't see any problem whatsoever with this person selling a New set of Travel Bug tags to a person interested in geocaching and perhaps only wanting to buy a single set of travel bug tags. What is a big rip off is that if I want to buy a single set of TB tags from geocaching.com, the cost is $5.99 and the SHIPPING to the east coast is an outrageous $7.41 sent via UPS!!!!. That brings the total to $13.40, so the one Buyer on eBay you mention who paid $10 + $1.75 shipping actually saved money by getting them from this Seller on eBay!!! I checked the eBay listing, and I see the Seller also started the bidding off at well below the retail cost so how exactly does that make them a bad person?!
On a personal note, I DO think it's ridiculous that even if I wanted to buy just one tiny little geocaching sticker, I'd still have to pay $7.41 in UPS shipping. That's completely outrageous, and I have passed this comment on to Groundspeak in the past, suggesting that if they lowered their shipping (which could be done quite simply by just using the USPS instead), they'd probably sell a lot more geocaching merchandise.
Moving on to the subject of the travel bug tracking numbers showing in the picture used for the auction listing, how do you even know that the tag number shown is the one that was actually sold to the Buyer. And even if it was, what geocacher do you know that would jot down an unactivated travel bug tracking number that they just happened to notice on an eBay listing, then wait around till the travel bug was actually activated, and then when it finally was activated, provided they can still find the piece of paper w/ that random tracking number they just happened to notice on eBay one day, start making fake travel bug postings to mess with that person's travel bug mileage. I mean really!!!! Who on earth would go to so much effort or better yet, WHY would they????? With all that's going on in the world, don't you guys have anything better to talk about or to worry about.
And lastly, as for the Zippo, I see that the auction was ended by the Seller when asked by Groundspeak since they were using their registered logo. However, the person was only asking $10. A brand new Zippo like that goes for close to $20 and the lapel pin I think sells for around $3 which Groundspeak obviously got their money for when the pin was purchased (plus another $7.00+ for shipping!).
