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On the other hand, I miss that I no longer look cool.

I'm in the exact same situation. Once I got rid of my stylish accessory, that's exactly what I was thinking.

Face it, you are a nation of consumers with no real manufacturing left.

The US still has manufacturing though much of it is hidden and you have to look for it. Check out Etsy, the place to buy and sell hand made things. Makezine and Craftzine are American zines for American makers and crafters. The US still has spinners who spin and create their own threads. Some of whom will go on to make their own cloth, others sell their threads to those who will make cloth. Then they will make or sell to those who make clothing. Only a few blocks from where I am typing this there's a workshop for hand bound books. Actually Minneapolis has a few places that custom bind books.

And this isn't particularly a dig at the US ... I think all Western economies will go the same way, as the governments and people all have the same short-sighted attitude. Pretty soon the only things left will be service jobs and tech jobs in the West, all manufacturing and production will be done in China and the surrounding ASEAN nations.

Ah but those other nations will become like the West too. The beauty of freer markets is that they improve everyone's lives who are allowed to participate. Your sweatshop is their employees' good life. Even Chinese want their iPhones.

Falcon

Something like this.

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=12121417

Or even with mufflers.

All the stuff CC and any of the other box stores sell is foreign made for pennies on the dollar of the price. The rest is making you want to buy it (marketing), retail markup, and profit. Design and engineering used to be a larger cost, but that's all outsourced now too. Since the internet has made retail markup on competitive electronics razor thin, CC & BB will both be gone. Electronics have become commodities - cheap, interchangeable, and disposable.

The future of consumption is in crafted goods. They're generally made with quality materials, will last longer, and are more unique than mass manufactured goods. Case in point: furniture. My wife and I buy our furniture from a local store that either buys from US factories or the Amish. It may cost 3-5 times more than IKEA, but our hardwood furniture will last long after we're gone, instead of becoming unfashionable or falling apart in a few years.

Another good example is http://etsy.com/

http://www.ecrater.com/
http://www.ioffer.com/
http://www.etsy.com/

Well, there are some alternatives to eBay. The ones that I know about that people are happiest with are really niche auction sites like etsy.com, which is an auction site for handmade crafts. Apparently eBay sucks for selling those as bidders don't appreciate the time spent on them. Those who wander to etsy do... so while you have a smaller pool of bidders, the overall amount bid tends to be higher. (That's what I'm told by my friend who 1) teaches a class on eBay and 2) sells jewellery online.)

After looking at the eBay fee increases (and doing the math to show a friend how much that really meant even on small items), I'd certainly be willing to check the fees and my luck over at auctions.overstock.com. Too bad Yahoo Auctions closed last year.

I was going to suggest this very thing, but then there's the problem of visibility. If you only have one game available on your website, you may not even show up on Google unless someone is specifically searching for your game.

One solution to this problem, though, may be following the Cheapass rulebook to the letter. Print your own boards and rules, let people find their own pawns, etc., then sell through a site like Paizo (which just happens to be how you buy Cheapass Games now). I don't have any idea how Paizo selects which games to include on their site, or if there are any other websites that would be interested in talking with you, but I'm sure you'll be able to find something (Etsy maybe?).

One last suggestion (and it may have already been mentioned), go spend some time in the Board Game Geek forums. I know that there are a lot of budding game developers there, and there may be some much better suggestions/solutions that they know of. You might also be able to develop a starting market there.

One of the coolest new companies out there run by twenty-somethings is Etsy -- they've got more cool stuff going on there than most of the businesses listed in this article.

All of the fraud problems that Ebay has been slow to handle are opening the door for smaller, more innovative companies to fill their niche. Ebay still only offers text-based searching, which seems a relic in the age of the AJAX and Flapjax stuff that sites like Etsy.com are offering.