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11 
Modern Life
Kiwis love a bargain. They love a bargain so much, that even the meagre 20 cent price to list an item on eBay seemed like a ‘bloody rip off’. So they invented TradeMe, which was not as fancy, but was marginally cheaper. Unsurprisingly, it was an instant hit.
The website was created by Sam Morgan, son of Gareth Morgan, famous economist, motorcyclist, and international bald rights activist. Originally named TradeSheep, it was designed as a platform to allow the rural community to trade excess livestock for essential city goods such as flat white coffees and Philippe Starck chairs. Pretty soon, however, non-rural people were using it too, selling everything from used V8s Holdens to Swandris, puffy leather sofas from tasteless furniture discounters with shit ads to endless unwanted Dave Dobbyn concert tickets.
Following a brief legal battle over naming rights with Dutch interracial animal-porn site, SpadeSheep, TradeMe, as we know it today, was born.
It has become so wildly popular, that per capita, Kiwis are the most frequent users of any internet auction site in the world. Even the nearest competitor, Nigeria, has less than half the number of registered eBay traders per head of population (and they are world famous for legitimate online trading!).
Some quick TradeMe facts;
- On average, every New Zealander has traded at least three times their personal net worth online, resulting, in 2008, in TradeMe posting a staggering gross turnover in the TENS of THOUSANDS of dollars! Easily smashing all known NZ company records.
- With approximately 15 page views per day, TradeMe now accounts for 139% of ALL internet traffic in New Zealand! The website is so busy they have invested in a state of the art 14,400 US Robotics Fax-Data Modem to handle the increase in hits. This technology is understood to be the first of it’s kind in New Zealand, and is widely hoped to propel the country into the forefront of 20th century science.
- National treasure and ten times winner of FHM’s annual “Stupid People We’d Like To F**K (Despite The Obvious Health Hazards)” gong, Nikki Watson, once auctioned a date with herself for charity, raising an impressive $4.83 for Poor Kids Without Legs.
In a perhaps sadly ironic twist of fate, TradeMe was recently sold on eBay to Australia, who, it is understood, intend to use the website to swap sacks of copper and iron ore for bottles of New Zealand’s abundant supply of water, when the price of their minerals eventually crash.
But since that is at least a few years away yet, here are some helpful tips for trading on TradeMe;
- If the item for sale in the photograph is blue, don’t ask what colour the item is.
- When applying for a job, SMS grammar, such as “thnx 4t intRvw, c u l8r!” is not advisable.
- Your old slippers may have a sentimental value of $199 to you, but a starting bid of 99c is probably more realistic
- If offering ‘Buyer can pick up’ on, say, a $2 used book, try not to photograph the brand new 42inch plasma TV, the Blue Ray DVD player, or the mantelpiece where you keep all your diamond-crusted gold jewelery in the background.
- Listing your shitty Christchurch bungalow that nobody wants at starting bids of 99c, in the hope that it’ll end up on Cambell Live, only works once, and it’s already been done. Twice.
- Buying a pizza restaurant in a shitty Christchurch stripmall for $99, without doing due diligence on the $200,000 of debt, is not newsworthy, even if it also ends up on Cambell Live. It’s just stupid. Sooo f**king stupid.
- Spending all day browsing TradeMe when you should be researching proper stories for your job as a journalist on Cambell Live, does not then mean it’s OK to then throw a segment together at the last minute based on an auction you saw on the site.
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I wish we had Trademe in Australia. We only have that horrible Ebay here. I used Tradme in NZ, it is great. I used RICARDO in Europe, that is great too.
Thought I may contribute this “If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies… It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.” – Albert Einstein
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Yep can’t deny that New Zealander’s like a bargain. But in reality this is just another way of saying that they are too cheap to buy something at full price, and will spend hours looking for the “good deals”. Of course they could be spending that time actually earning more money. Funny thing is that in general almost everything you buy in this country is severely overpriced anyway.
This of course applies to Trademe goods as well, because while New Zealander’s love to buy cheaply, there is another national obsession called “ripping each other off”.
Ebay Australia is much better than Trademe, cheaper, more professionally run, safer, quicker, and has much more honest feedback. Even with the extra cost of shipping, most stuff is cheaper there.
Of course if you really want to get a bargain, shop overseas through the internet in countries like China or Hong Kong. You will get your goods much cheaper and if you pay through paypal you can reduce the risk to nothing.
Oh and the Warehouse “Where everyone USED to get a bargain” is now more expensive than other chain stores like Farmers, and the service is……..well……they don’t have any. Fortunately they do have a good return policy though, since half the stuff you buy there you have to take back.
Gotta love New Zealand, the land of the cheap, nasty, crappy, overpriced merchandise and non-existent service.
This article is actually very educational. I appreciate the moment you put in publishing this post. I would like to become a nurse, do you have any option where I could get data about nurse salaries, career points and what is the basis. Any idea where I could get this details?
Selwyn, is Nogood your real name or a witty pseudonym? I have to ask as I have found Kiwis to have very peculiar names generally, except those who arrived in the last 100 years I think. I wondered if people with funny names were deported from the UK at the same time as religious freaks were sent off to New England and egg thieves to Australia.
your all jealous gays.
I take it from the spelling of “your” that you are referring to the possessive form of the 2nd person (as in “belonging to you”), in which case you are correct. My gays are indeed all jealous. Until recently, however, they were only 70% jealous, but a little shiny leather and soap-on-a-rope sorted that.
So now that we’ve cleared that up, the question remains: What about my “all jealous” gays?
The Warehouse..where everyone get’s a bargain. Some amazing rejects in that place!
Hey have you tried the trademe customer service.
Wooo. Thats a bit of fun, it almost seems like your talking to people from Wellington.
Actually another indication of the cheapskate side of NZ is the hilariously successful (in NZ) chain the Warehouse… where everyone gets a bargain… as long as they weren’t wanting to much of anything that will still do the job in 5 years time