In answer to Rick's question "How'd we do?" here are some comparative statistics: 2003 2002 2001 2000 lots 336 322 289 310 (411) bidders 49 71 54 57 gross $2148 $2517 $2923 $2485 -splits $611 $486 $869 $672 net $1537 $2031 $2054 $1754 Definitely the lowest year in quite a bit, though we pushed an insane amount of lots through. I liked that there was so much in member splits. The focus of the auction continues to move from nearly all store-supplied items the way it was 10 years ago, to an opportunity for members to sell their stuff. That's pretty cool. Lots of plants. Consider that as one of 3-4 auctioneers, I spent the entire night auctioning nothing but plants. That means perhaps 1/3 of the auction was plants! One silver lining of the low income is that lots of folks got some great deals. In past years, one of the reasons for higher prices has been the presence of bidders who will bid a certain amount on every item... there were no people like that last night. My only wish for next year is that we have more folks who can turn into runners at the end to help people with their items. That was the one bottleneck. Actually, check-in was also a problem, because initially we had too many auctioneers and not enough computer folks (there should be a fourth person running late checkin). On the bright side, there was good "substitution" with computer people later in the evening (I personally subbed all three stations at different times!). - Erik -- Erik Olson erik at thekrib dot com ------------------ To unsubscribe from this list, e-mail majordomo@thekrib.com with "unsubscribe gsas-board" in the body of the message. Old messages are available at http://lists.thekrib.com/gsas-board When asked, log in as username is "gsas-board", and password "gsas-bored".