Evan,
Slow down. Your original point, which is that $486 was way too high for
that poster when another just solid for $20 is valid as far as it
goes... but you yourself were saying the $486 is obviously way too high,
so why complain when someone (Bruce or anyone else) offers to pay $100
to $150 for one? If we take the average between the two recent sales, we
get a price of $253. In fact, if you look at the bid history, only 2
people were willing to go as high as $475. The next bid below them was
for $255. Below that came bids of $177...then $82... then $38. So, only
3 other people were willing to bid above the $100 mark for this poster.
Knowing this, for Bruce to offer $150 for one is only about $100 above
what the next LIBIANNA might go for (maybe)... or, the next one might go
for $100 or less, depending on which bidders show up to play. If you're
buying stuff to either to resell or to auction off, you can't pay close
to what you think a poster might reasonably... I said reasonably...
bring. You have to leave plenty of wiggle room in case it doesn't go for
anything close to what you think it might. You can't count of a crazy
bidding war between two well-heeled buyers erupting. That doesn't happen
all that often, not even with Bruce's auctions.
You seem to be basing your complaint about Bruce's offer on the idea
that poster prices are somewhat fixed and predictable. They're not -- as
you yourself have demonstrated by pointing out that almost
simultaneously one LIBIANNA sold for $20 bucks while another sold for
$486. The poster price market is the wild west. You never know what
price something will go for. It's nothing like selling boxes of Cherrios
where you know exactly how much each box is going to sell for and you
have tremendous daily sales volume so you can get by with only a 5% to
20% profit margin.
You say you realize Bruce is an auctioneer, but go on like he is a
retail "dealer" who will set a price and stick to it. If Bruce were to
purchase one LIBRIANNA for $150 or three for $300 he could reasonably
expect to make some money auctioning them -- but how much money, no one
knows. Based on the last auction, in the best case scenario, the bidder
who went up to $475 last time would only have to go up to $260 next time
to win. But if the $255 bidder didn't participate, then he might have to
pay only $175... or $85... or $39. No one can say. So it wouldn't make
sense for Bruce to offer to purchase 3 of them at anything even close to
$250 each -- he would almost certainly lose quite a bit of money if he
did. Me, personally, I wouldn't even want a LIBIANNA hanging on my wall
at any price (the quality of the artwork is fairly crude and nowhere
near as sexy as a lot of other posters in that particular genre) so you
wouldn't even get a $20 bid from me.
I do realize that underlying your creeb to Bruce you are really still
bemoaning someone having paid $486 for this poster. But you simply can't
say the $486 buyer "got reamed" because no one forced that buyer to bid
so high. Hey, it says right here on page 93 of Auction Basis 101 that a
person should never, ever put in a "maximum bid" which is higher than
what they really, truly want to pay. But two people did put in those
high bids, and that's their choice and the fact that a LIBIANNA sold
elsewhere for $20 is immaterial to their crazy little bidding war. They
either didn't know about the other $20 offer or didn't want to bid there
(the first is much more likely). But the same thing applies to the other
4 people who also bid more than $20 -- they just didn't get quite so
carried away.
And, anyway, there's no getting around the fact that Bruce *started* the
bidding on that poster at only 99 cents.
Now, if Bruce were an actual retail "dealer" and was planning to set a
fixed price of $450 each of the three LIBIANNAs he purchased for resale,
then obviously he would be stealing them at $100 each. But only if he
could actually sell all three of them in any reasonable time frame for
$450 each. If he only sold one, he'd be ahead $150, not a bad profit,
but he might have to hold on to the other two for many, many years
before he sold another at that price again. He might have to hold on to
them forever or finally give in and sell them for far less. Any "dealer"
faces this problem every day when they are purchasing inventory for
resale. Everyone wants to sell their stuff for top dollar, but a dealer
has to buy inventory far below that level if he wants to stay in
business for very long.
I have noticed over the years that a lot of people who used to complain
about how "unfair" the "dealers" were eventually started selling posters
themselves. Shortly after that, they stopped complaining as they
realized it was a lot harder to make money at it than they had thought.
-- JR
Evan Zweifel wrote:
Missed several points?
His point was -- I just auctioned this for $486, I'd like to buy 3 more of them
for $300!
My first point was that this poster was worth closer to $20 than to $486.
Bruce's offer and your explanation seem to reinforce this. If this really is
the case, the purchaser just got reamed! You should send them a letter of
congratulations. I'm not saying he didn't bring it upon himself, I'm just
saying ...
My second point was that -- if we assume that a poster is actually worth $486, what is a
fair offer from a "dealer" for that poster -- is it really lesss than 1/3?
Because if that's the current rate, I want in! Damn! For some posters I might even go as
high as 4/10.
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