Ecay Fever

The disadvantages to living on a desolate isle in the middle of nowhere can sometimes be numerous. High travel costs, no protection from hurricanes, higher expenses for goods and a less than healthy interest in other's business, just to name a few. However, sometimes you can work them to your advantage. Take the hurricane warnings for example. There are plenty of full and half days off work when hurricane season is at its peak. High travel costs may make us moan, but they do keep away the average tourist. As discussed in earlier blogs, one of the clear disadvantages, in my opinion, is the lack of materialistic goods. I like a good shop, just like every other girl, but it is close to impossible to find a good bargain on the island, and most of the items here center around gaudy patterns, beach themes and floral prints... hardly worth getting excited about. This cloud does have a silver lining though, in the form of a website called Ecay. This site is modelled after Ebay (hopefully you picked up that connection!) and is similar to Kijiji, but a million times better than both. When living on a tiny island with no access to mainland goods without paying exorbitant prices, Ecay provides some relief with its buy and sell feature. No shipping, and the ability to track down the bastard who sells you something crappy, make this site a favourite for all islanders. We got an amazing bargain on our dive gear last year, from a woman seeking a divorce because her husband made her scuba dive. We also have bought both of our cars off of Ecay (okay, to be fair, the first car was a bit of a lemon). So when it came time to start getting rid of our items we turned to this website. We didn't actually think we would sell some of the stuff we were offering. They seemed like random items; a blow up mattress, a floor lamp, a drying rack and a red Igloo cooler. The beauty of inflated costs soon became glaringly evident when only an hour after we posted the cooler we had 4 emails, three calls and many texts. No matter that the average person can head across to Cost-U-Less and buy their own cooler for $10 more, everyone here wants the bargain! Although the cooler was gone in less than 12 hours, we also managed to sell the drying rack and mattress the next day. The lamp was slightly less coveted, but sold on the third day. After the initial cooler frenzy Blake and I got Ecay Fever. We started posting everything. Our dive gear went up, including the smallest accessory, like the dive knife. Then the car. It was a free-for-all! The calls started pouring in, and if someone did not know better, Blake could have been taken for the busiest drug dealer in town; cell phone ringing constantly while we frantically made drop-off and pick-up appointments. Through the fervour we even debated selling our landlords possessions. Cooler Lady actually perused our living room with a greedy eye, asking what else we were selling. It was so highly addictive that we were late for our dates with friends, and spent the entirety of last Saturday on the phone and computer.

Aside from one fall through on a BCD from Blake's dive kit, we managed to sell all of our dive gear last weekend. Blake the accountant whipped out the calculator and discovered we did this with a 225% profit! The car is still up though, and only time will tell. We don't actually want to sell it until the end of the month, so I'm not too worried. I can't say that I didn't feel a little guilty at first, about preying on the Caymanian's with my second hand wares, but it seems this is the culture. Gone are the days of garage sales (Hope yours goes well this weekend Reita! Send us whatever you can't sell!) and here are the days of virtual sales. Piqued by the sale of our goods, I did a thorough search of Ecay and discovered that much weirder items have been sold. Like the 33rd edition of an unknown book, gold grillz- you know, the denture like gold teeth that rappers wear, and an obviously free-in-a-beer-box Coors Light laptop bag. So with that knowledge I no longer feel like such a vulture. But enough of this babble, it is nearly bedtime and I must be off for one final check of our hits on Ecay. Have a great night!

Pictured above: Aforementioned Coors Light Laptop bag, some old rapper's gold teeth, our dive gear