[GSAS-board] Plant Auctopsy 2008

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

First off, the statistics

                2008    2007    2006    2005    2004    2003    2002    2001    
 2000

bidders         46      42      28      39      43      30      34      39      
38
lots            254     244     267     242     322     264     259     231     
260
gross $         1908    1977    1195    1299    1636    1327    1180    1624    
1479
splits $        721     672     146     194     453     265     150     403     
413

Note that there are 6 memberships in this total ~ $90:

Hiro Takahashi
Andrew Pope
Kyle Tran
Lawrence Kent
Amelia Hepner
Shango Los

OK, what went wrong?  That was easy: Extra blank page at the end of each 
printout.  Will fix by April.  That was all that went wrong, as far as I 
was concerned.  It was a great auction.  Numbers are good.  2nd highest 
gross (even without the memberships) in 9 years of record-keeping.  Good 
number of lots.  Fast-moving, 2 items / minute.  Started just 
before 7:30, finished up before 9:30.  Perfect length. 
Record number of splits paid to members (important part of the auctions, 
especially the plant auction -- get our cuttings into the hands of 
others).  Oh, and a record number of bidders.  I thought the room looked 
full.

All the pre-work was perfect, was quick, but not panicked.  Bags looked 
good.  Ziplocks really are better for plants (though more expensive, I 
suspect?).

Phil did awesome as an auctioneer again.  People commented on how 
professional he was.  Things kept moving at a decent pace.  Paul providing 
color commentary worked nicely -- maybe I should include a second mic in 
my kit next year?

The runners kept everything moving.  We just never had any dead spots, so 
common in auctions.  Clay, I have no idea how your wife tracked all those 
3, 4, and 6-item multi-auctions.  I couldn't even handle two at a time!

Phil's wife was very smart on the computer.  She used the "paper trail" of 
discarded tags and bidder cards intelligently to find the small handful 
of mistakes.  Clay's daughter did an excellent job on the computer as well 
-- she knew exactly what to do.  Through 90% of the auction, everything 
was on the computer within seconds of arriving.

Oh, I guess I lied about no other problems. There was a small handful of 
people checking out before their items were entered.  We have to stress at 
the general auction that anyone checking out early has not bid on anything 
in the past few minutes, and we just plain CLOSE the checkout during the 
last 10 minutes of bidding until all the tags are cleared.  But we're 
talking like $5 total that was lost.  No biggie.

NO LOST LICENSES!  YAY!

   - Erik


-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com
_______________________________________________
GSAS-board mailing list
GSAS-board@thekrib.com
http://lists.thekrib.com/mailman/listinfo/gsas-board