Michael wrote:
> [...] No, what I am shocked at comes
>under other headings, and if 95% of that was put up for auction over here in
>even the most run-down auction house it wouldn't even get a maiden bid.
>
>Now I will not go into the whys and wherefors of peoples tastes, be they
>English or American, but if ebay and tooldeal were to auction the lowest
>quality items I saw in a recent auction over here they would be of a far far
>higher quality than what I have seen on their lists. [...]

Hi Mike

This is pretty far off topic, so I'll try to keep it short (yeah, as if)...

...but the main problem here is that you're comparing the proverbial apples
and hammers.  The only thing that places like E-bay and traditional
"houses" have in common is the word "auction" in their titles; and if
someone insists on thinking of them as in anyway similar, they will never
understand what's going on here.

You are no doubt right that any of these items may not bring even the most
minimal bid in the auction houses that you describe.  But that's not what's
happening here.  The point is anybody, anywhere can play.  And as such,
it's a **completely** different game.

If I have a stack of tattered 15-year old TV Guides lying in my front
closet that I want $5 apiece for, I sure as heck don't know anybody
personally who would pay me that price.  And any (realworld) auction house
would laugh me out of the building if I insisted on such a minimal/reserve
bid.

*But* that doesn't mean that there's not some dude, sitting in his pajamas
at his cabin up in Montana --or in Canberra- who's been looking for
_exactly_ these issues.  And whom I would never have had a rat's chance of
meeting any other way. And who *certainly* would never have heard of my
neighborhood auction house.

In short, its a wholly unprecedented mechanism for getting seller and buyer
together.  (On a similar note, within arm's reach of where I sit typing are
several books which I never would have owned otherwise, coming as they did
from used bookstores in NJ, northern California, BC and a half dozen other
places I've never visited and most likely never will.)

Now, is there a lot of junk out there?  Sure.  But 1] one man's rubble is
another man's Elgin Marbles (recall that E-bay started as a website for
auctioning Pez dispensers[!]; moreover, the number of SWMBO stories on this
list make it clear that there are plenty of folks out there that would
consider anyone who wasted $100 on a mint #55 out of their mind %-) and 2]
it's hard not to believe that a lot of this is driven by the novelty of the
situation.  Give it a year or two.

Is all this driving up the prices I pay?  Undoubtedly.  But a lot of this
is simply the fact that I'm bidding against people who never would have
been in the game otherwise.  It's one thing to go to my neighbor's yardsale
--where I'd be the only who would recognize a mint condition Stanley #2--
and quite another to find myself bidding against that jerk in Montana who
bought my TV Guides.

And I freely admit that I've been bit as badly by this is anyone.  But
that's primarily due to the fact that I'm almost exclusively a consumer in
this market.  If I were less of a packrat and were actually willing to sell
some of this stuff, I suspect that I might have a rather different take on
things...

The other question to ask is: is this always going to stay a seller's
market? Most likely not.  (My own take on this is wait a couple of years
for the economy to soften.  There'll be plenty of planes bought as toys on
e-bay out there that you'll be able to pick up for a song.)

Even if that doesn't happen, it's likely that some good'll come out of
this.  If, for example, Stanley prices continue to soar through the roof,
maybe this means that other brands will start looking better.  Or --once it
becomes clear that the market's really there-- there'll be more LN-like
operations opening up.

N
---
Nichael Cramer
nichael@s...                           nulla dies sine linea
http://www.sover.net/~nichael/