RE: Post auction misc.

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

On Sat, 17 Apr 2004, Rick Rose wrote:

>               In an auction such as ours, there should be 3 winners.  The
> Donor (who gets name recognition and advertisement,) the club (who gets the
> bid amount) and the purchaser (who gets valuable items at a better price
> than they could at retail.)  One person, specifically, told me that the
> reason they were willing to outbid everyone else on the 55 gallon tank and
> stand setup ($48) is because they intended to turn around and advertise it
> for sale in the newspaper and expected to get $150.00 for it!

My perspective as a former board member:

This has certainly been a recurring issue in the auctions.  Heck, in many
of the auctions there's been a guy in the back who owns or works at a fish
store who just bids things up to the point where it would be profitable to
resell.  (This isn't to be confused with the year Sasquatch came and bid
up everything ABOVE retail because he was out of his mind at the time.)

This burns some people up.  But there's a couple things to consider:  
First, the general auction is not three-pronged.  Its purpose is to raise
money for the club.  If making members happy brings in more money, that's
great.  But if that guy in the back makes the difference between the club
only getting $500 of its yearly budget, we go with the evil fish store
guy.  Second, these speculative winners still aren't buying the item at
retail.  In fact, unless the person is very stupid (or generous to the
club), it's gotta be less than *wholesale*, because they could get it
cheaper from the wholesaler.  So it's still a very good deal, just not a
ridiculously-good deal.

Now if nobody else wanted to fork over more than $48 for the 55 setup, an
excellent price if it's in good shape, then I'm glad the club got the
extra few bucks from the speculator.  If, however, the majority of the
room recognized that the tank was worth only $30, then the winner is
probably NOT going to get $150 from it, even after spending all the money
(probably at least $50) on the advertising fees in the Times.  And they
have to haul it home.  You could say the same thing about people who buy
fish and then resell them on Aquabid: the fish might die, they might not
get a bidder, etc.  By the way, I don't know if the tank was any good; I
didn't really look at any of the tanks.

As an aside, club money not been the goal of the PLANT auction.  The plant
auction had as its primary goal to bring in quality plants at reasonable
prices for members (originally 15 years ago when there wasn't a way to get
them).  It has evolved a secondary goal of bringing in money for the club
(sort of unofficially earmarked for plant-related things).  But this is 
why we got so upset at the aforementioned Sasquatch incident, and ended up 
buying plants for everyone at the next meeting.  But we've never 
apologized to anyone for getting outbid at the general auction.  And this 
year wasn't too bad.  I didn't really perceive any one person bidding up 
every item. 

Also, I think it's OK to sell broken stuff, but it should be labeled 
accordingly!  I buy lots of busted stuff on Ebay and fix it (and sell it 
back on EBay for more... oh boy, I'm evil aren't I :).

  - Erik

-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com

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