Broke, Weird People

According to Ecommerce News, In the eyes of Ebay, the year 2004 found consumers to be poorer and weirder.

"The past year brought an explosion of the bizarre -- on both the seller and buyer side. That's in addition to the cheese sandwich bought by Internet gaming company GoldenPalace.com, which plans to take the sandwich on tour.

Earlier in December, a woman listed her father's cane, along with her father's ghost. She wrote in the listing that her son had been afraid of her father and that after the father died, the boy was afraid his ghost would stick around. So she got rid of the cane -- and the ghost along with it -- on eBay.

GoldenPalace bought that, too -- for $65,100.
"What it tells me is there's a market for anything," says Paul Dholakia, a marketing professor at Rice University who studies eBay. "It demonstrates the power of eBay, that it can create a global market for people on the fringes doing weird stuff."