If you’ve ever tut-tutted over the consequences of big-box stores and online retailers overtaking small businesses, you’ll be heartened to hear that some folks have figured out how to bring those old-fashioned mom-n-pop ideas about customer service into the digital age…with the help of a big ol’ corporation called eBay!

While browsing the auction site for some new shades, my pal Josh stumbled across one such example — a listing from a Florida-based eBayer who goes by the name of whiteblizzard70.

This goes on for several more paragraphs (see for yourself), but I’ll skip to my favorite part — the postscript.

(Josh decided not to bid.)

related: Top five musical crimes perpetrated by record store customers
extra credit: How do you get out of an ebay auction? [consumerist.com]

P.S. This post reminded me of another note my friend Josh told me about a few months back — a piece of reader mail he’d received as an editor at the music mag Blender. Granted, most readers who take the time to write in to magazines like Blender are at least a little bit…off, to say the least. But the last part of this letter — a response to an “Ask Blender” column about the urban legend that Debbie Harry of Blondie was once abducted by Ted Bundy — is genuinely spine-chilling. (Passive-aggressive? Not so much. Creepy? Um, yes.)

Where do you suppose this “anomous” Tampa, Florida resident stands on the whole nature-vs.-nurture debate?

Interested? here’s a free preview!

related: Your to lazy

Eli says this sign has been hanging in the window of the local pizza place for several weeks now. (Really, with that whole “talking and working” requirement, are you surprised they weren’t deluged with applications?)

related: Bizarre pardoning accident

Nadia received this letter from her boyfriend’s cousin, Amy, who recently relocated with her boyfriend from Saskatoon to Victoria, B.C…and have been shacking up with Nadia and her boyfriend even since. Over the past month, roomie relations have become a bit strained, to say the least.

“We had to send a stray cat she was harboring to a friend’s house temporarily (my allergies were killing me),” Nadia says, and Amy proceeded to pout for three days straight. A minor-blow out ensued, which was then followed by this untitled composition. Nadia and her boyfriend are scheduled to move out on Wednesday.

Adds Nadia: “A friend of mine (a B.A. in professional writing and linguistics) and I (a high school science and math teacher with a zoology degree and a B.Ed.) corrected all of the mistakes in the letter.” Then, fighting ire with ire, they posted it on the fridge.

related: Nice move

Writes our anonymous submitter from Kentucky: “I work at a gym. I was checking the women’s locker room to make sure it wasn’t a fetid stinkpit (it wasn’t) when I saw three of these lying on the counter. I went to throw them out and found a whole mess of them in the trash can, too.”

related: like a rotten sponge

Courtney in California spotted this in the front yard of a neighborhood she happened to be cruising through today — one she says is “full of blue-hairs.”

Adds Courtney: “I just may be knocking on this person’s front door sometime this week. I HAVE to know what Melba’s letter said!”

related: You can do it. We can’t help

Spotted by Weston in the back room of a Dallas Starbucks…the coffee chain’s recipe for the “keep-our-employees-locked-in-petty-arguments-so-they-won’t-unionize-accino”!

(Add one pump “disgruntled English Lit Ph.d.s” + one pump “functional illiterates”; shake well.)

related: An extra bold request

extra credit: Starbucks gossip

Most drivers could easily identify these duct-tape wrapped shapes as the universal sign for “Caution: Crazy Person Ahead,” but our submitter in Boston actually pulled over and parked in order to get a better look. Up close, “the signs were even crazier than we thought,” she reports. “Seriously, what happened to this guy?”

related: Movin’ out (Anthony’s song)