The Lost Art of Communication - CONTEST ENTRY

[Srman77]

The Lost Art of Communication

By: Srman77 (Sean Ruml)

In this day and age where we have all forms of ways to communicate with one another, it seems that we have lost the art of communication. There is no better example of this then in buying / selling, or trading sports cards. I myself admit that I’ve caught myself in doing what I have gotten irritated by others for doing. Whether it was ignoring a message, or just never getting back to someone. That being said it’s time for a change so that we don’t lose the art of communication. I see it happen quite a bit on the forum and on other sites as well. It seems every day that we are becoming more and more anti-social with one another.

Recently I was on the forum and saw a thread where another trader had cards for sale. In this traders thread it stated to either post to the thread of pm them and they would get back when they got home from work. I can understand the getting back to people after work, as I work during the week and there are times that I cannot get to the computer right away. I don’t know this trader personally, and I know that this trader is a trader with a high number of deals from seeing his number of trades, and or sales / buys made. So this person must be really good at making a deal, however a deal cannot be made when you don’t communicate back to the person that tells you they are interested and would like to know how much money you’re looking to get for an item.

I’ve heard some traders say things like “Trades are down on the site” or “Trading is slow lately”, and I can’t help but wonder sometimes if it’s not so much a matter of being slow but rather a lack of communication between traders. I mean when a trader posts a thread and says they will get back to you and they don’t, that’s a simple breakdown in communication. Or a trader sends a message to another trader and it’s never responded to, that’s another breakdown in communication. Just as an example as to what I’ve stated, within the last few months I had started dealing with another trader on procuring a couple of cards from them. We negotiated at the time what was a fair deal. The other trader was supposed to post up the deal and, I was to confirm the deal. A few days went by and I noticed that the deal had not been posted yet. So I politely sent the other trader a message just to see what was going on. The trader told me that the trade would be posted the next day.

The next day came and went and still no deal had been posted. At that point I thought “Is this trader stringing me along, do they really not want to make a deal?” So at that point I just moved on and left the deal where it was which was nowhere. It was about a week or so later the other trader finally sent me a message apologizing for completely dropping the ball on this deal and not communicating to me as to what was going on, and the trader wanted to know if I still wanted to get the deal done. At that point I had since moved on with other deals. I responded and let the trader know that I wasn’t mad, and I would still be interested in a deal but, I was now only interested in one of the items the trader had for sale and was wanting to know a price with shipping included. Nothing was ever communicated back to me other than the sound of silence.

I have no hard feelings about the deal not getting done. It was what it was. My feeling is had there been more communication going both ways, a deal would have gotten done between the two of us. The best advice I can give traders new and old is to communicate with one another. Don’t ignore each other but rather if you’re not interested then say it. It’s easier to say “I’m not interested or I’ll pass for now thanks” then to ignore the person and lose that human connection. Not to mention karma has a funny way of paying us all back. The person you ignore today may be the person who ignores you in the future.

[Pheebs888]

Thanks for the entry, posted here: https://www.sportscardforum.com/artic...communication/