On Tue, 5 Jan 2010, Phil Lacefield Jr. wrote:
I certainly won't participate if it's moved to a Saturday. I know I'msounding like a broken record... we already devote a ton of time at the normal meetings to auctions, and the general auction is crazy long. Now see, I don't get that. Isn't that the whole point of the Feb meeting is a plant auction? And if it's grown to the point where it needs to be longer, and our only choice is Saturday, why wouldn't we want to move it there? The auctions make us a LOT of money, as we've seen, and the more money we have the more cool speakers we can fly in from elsewhere. I think our membership really digs the auctions, both the after-meeting ones and the big ones, simply looking at the attendance proves this. Why not give the membership more of what they want? And who cares how long the auctions are if the items up for bid are good, everyone's happy AND the GSAS makes money to support things throughout the year?
I am stating that *I* care how long the auctions are, and that I will not participate in a second Saturday auction. I am not even sure I have the stomach to participate in the one in April this year. I really don't want to rehash it, but it's a lot of work, and *not* every member is interested in sitting around for 5 hours.
I attribute the increased attendance at the auctions to the increased publicity for them, not to the increased hours. You have to look at the attrition over time to really get a good picture of whether folks like "more".
Here's a rough histogram of when bidders checked out at the April auction:
hour of auction # of checkouts 11:00 hour 6 Noon hour 3 1 PM hour 3 2 PM hour 13 3 PM hour 8 4 PM ~ 4:45 16 stayed to end 24 And in last year's plant auction: begin - 7:59 4 8:00 - 8:59 14 9:00-9:43 14 stayed to end (9:44) 22Only 1/3 made it until the end last April. Lots of people trickled out in the second half.
- Erik -- Erik Olson Sent from my crusty old Linux box erik at thekrib dot com _______________________________________________ GSAS-board mailing list GSAS-board@thekrib.com http://lists.thekrib.com/mailman/listinfo/gsas-board