unlocking liquidity, Ebay and UPS

Ebay made great advances in helping regular people unlock liquidity by finding buyers for otherwise idle property - the "national garage sale" concept meant that, with modest effort, regular people could reach millions of potential customers and turn near-junk into cash.  But I feel that Ebay never reached the finish line of this and, instead, became more of an alternative marketplace for professional retailers.  And I believe this more populist vision stalled because of concerns regarding fraud and reliability.  One solution would be for Ebay to make the very large infrastructure investment to take over the small scale "sell it on Ebay" stores to professionalize and standardize these efforts.  Barring that, the next best choice would be a UPS - not merely adding "sell it on Ebay" to the existing UPS stores but, rather, using the massive UPS warehouses to reimagine the entire business.  The warehousing and shipping power of UPS could bring the necessary reliability to give everyone access to the liquidity that Ebay promised.  Counterparty risk, quality risk, shipping risk and payment risk could all be handled through UPS acting as a middleman.

saving for the future

For a long time I've wondered how to make sense of an extreme example. Assume we are all the same age. And we all save diligently for retirement. And we all retire at roughly the same age. What are those savings worth? Anything? If cash? If non-portable assets? If portable assets? I'm thinking about conversion of retirement savings into services and whether this means, if the stock of available services is roughly fixed (number of people available to provide the services), that you just see crazy inflation. Oddly, does this also mean that, if we all got uniformly poorer (for example, if all of our equity portfolios got cut by 40%), is there a more muted effect than you might expect? I don't really get it.