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Many antiques dealers, who would seem most threatened by eBay, have seen their livelihoods transformed. David James, for example, opened his shop in Alexandria, Va., eight years ago. He deals mostly in what the trade calls smalls: candlesticks, glassware and other such collectibles. He's still got the store, but today his business--and his life--revolve around a warehouse a few miles away, where he stores the treasures he has gleaned from scouting estate sales and flea markets. From a cramped, windowless cubicle, he monitors the hundreds of auctions he has posted--moving anywhere from $40,000 to $75,000 a month. He has hired a full-time employee to oversee his eBay business and plans to move to a new space complete with a miniprocessing center.
For as long as there has been an Internet, of course, there have been anti-Internet fuddy-duddies, pessimists who lament the end of face-to-face sociability as people retreat from the bustling public square to their computers for the anonymous encounters of cyberspace. With some justification, the pessimists can trace the decline of shopping, that most social of activities, from the mom-and-pop corner shop, where everyone knows everyone else, to the department store, where we might recognize one of the cashiers, and from there to the vast warehouse of the superstore, where no one knows anyone--and finally to the Internet, where human contact is reduced to the pulsing of electrons.
But the evidence suggests that eBay represents a return to that earlier one-on-one sociability--and maybe even improves on it, since the Net collapses the traditional divisions of geography and class. Wherever you plant your modem, the fabled new economy arrives--even in the boonies, as Patricia Hoyt calls her hometown of Baker, Mont., roughly 225 miles from the nearest big city, Billings. The old economy of oil and cattle has not been kind to Baker, and when oil prices dropped, business dried up at the motel Hoyt and her husband own.
But Hoyt had a hobby: making decorative glass beads. Thanks to eBay, her hobby is now her livelihood. She sells as many as 3,000 beads a month, for as much as $50 each. eBay has given her more than a new career. She refers without irony to the bead community she has discovered online. Glass beads have spawned an entire network of chat groups and e-mail lists. Many of her customers buy weekly. "If I don't put up any auctions for a week," she says, "they'll write me and ask, 'Are you O.K.?'"
The community angle is one that eBay executives work hard to promote. Users find electronic newsletters catering to their obsessive interests, visit chat rooms where buyers and sellers can get acquainted and swap tips, drop in at a cafe where they can catch up on the latest community news. Everywhere you turn--or click--you find the chipper, boosterish tone of a small-town newspaper--that is, a small-town paper with almost 8 million writers and readers.