Do people forget to comparison shop?

In my obsession for getting Legos, I've been following a bunch of auctions on eBay. Some of them are kind of humorous to me because they are priced higher than ordering new direct from Lego or they say "hard to find" when they're on the Lego website. In addition, I've found some other items that are cheaper on a site called BrickLink which is a conglomerate of people selling Lego sets. One reason, I'd guess for not buying direct from Lego is that the regular shipping is via UPS from Connecticut. Since I'm probably the furthest you can get from CT in the continental US (ordering stuff from LL Bean would travel a longer distance), the shipping is slow (the rains last week didn't help) and frankly, the boxes are not packed well. The outer box and many of the inner boxes were dented, but nothing was broken. It must be hard to break Lego sets short of stepping on them.