eBay's Grilled Cheese Diet

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You can't blame eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY). It has to deal with folks trying to sell everything from body parts to fake props of historical notoriety to Milli Vanilli CDs. So when it saw Diana Duyser trying to sell a grilled cheese sandwich that she claimed bore the likeness of the Virgin Mary, it cancelled that auction to nip the hoax in the bud.

Yet Duyser was serious. She had kept the sandwich, after taking one errant nibble, as a religious relic for 10 years and she had every intention of handing it over to the highest bidder. So this week eBay changed its mind and let Duyser relist her sandwich.

Here is why eBay -- and just as importantly the eBay community -- is so great. More than 800,000 people have checked out Duyser's auction, and enterprising sellers on the popular auction site are taking advantage of that traffic.

More than 200 auctions on the site include Grilled Cheese Virgin Mary in their title. While the first batch of piggyback listings may have been either malicious (such as a Virgin Mary steak or a sandwich with a smiley face) or just ploys to draw attention (by tacking on the word NOT in the title, then the actual item), you have to admire the next wave. Enter the search terms and you see folks selling t-shirts bearing the likeness of the sandwich and someone even put up an original watercolor painting of the now famous item.

I imagine that even the quieter auction halls of Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) and Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) have a token related item or two. What? You didn't know that those sites offer consumer auctions? Well, that's just a testament to eBay's ubiquity then, isn't it?

What's the oddest thing that you have ever seen on the eBay auction block? Have you ever considered the site as a great place to go holiday shopping? All this and more -- in the eBay Discussion Board. Only on Fool.com.

Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz is a satisfied eBay user and can't remember the last time he had a really good grilled cheese sandwich. Wait. No. He still can't remember. He does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story, and he is a member of the Rule Breakers analytical team, seeking out the next great growth stock early in its defiance.