[Groop] Groop Regarding EBAY and auctions (Rick Loomis)

[Rick Loomis]

Heh, heh, keep in mind that I am "smiling" when I say all this. But a 
seller who has a Groo collectable is almost certainly another Groo 
fan who has to sell his prized item for one reason or another. He 
certainly does "deserve" a fair price for his item.

And an auction only inflates the value/price of an item if one of the 
bidders gets caught up in the frenzy of bidding and bids more than he 
was willing to pay in the first place. As in my example, if both 
bidders stop at their maximum price, the item sells at the lower of 
the two prices. If two people are willing to pay $75 or higher for an 
item, it certainly *is* worth $75. The auction has proved that.

And I don't see why an auction makes it seem like an object is rarer 
than it really is. For one thing, in seconds you can search EBAY's 
millions of items to see what other Groo items are being auctioned. 
And you can set up an automatic search to let you know when a Groo 
item is offered. If someone sees that a Groo statue made out of 
hardened cheese dip is going for $75, and he happens to have one he 
is willing to sell for that much, he should rush out and put his up 
for auction too. (And notify the losing bidder that it is available.)

At any rate, collaborative bidding is certainly a good idea from the 
Groop perspective. I was just pointing out that there is another 
perspective (that of the seller) and that if someone in the group 
wants to bid against his friends, he doesn't need to feel guilty about it.

Rick
(Not a Pirate)
(And probably won't bid against another Groop member either, in spite 
of what I said above)

At 12:00 PM 10/9/07, you wrote:
>Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2007 14:55:51 -0400
>From: "Neil Ottenstein" <neil.ottenstein at gmail.com>
>Subject: [Groop] Groop Regarding EBAY and auctions
>To: groop at groo.com
>Message-ID:
>         <c8e3c2360710091155r4275e1e3t1b8012a8ff9963bf at mail.gmail.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
>It is the seller's objective to get as much money as possible for an
>item.  It is the buyer's objective to get an item for as little as
>possible.  The seller doesn't "deserve" anything.  Auctions
>artificially inflate the price of items in the first place. In many
>cases they make it appear that there is less supply of an item than
>there really is.  Collaborative bidding sounds like a good idea from a
>group perspective.
>
>On 10/9/07, Rick Loomis <rick at flyingbuffalo.com> wrote:
> > You realize, of course, from the sellers point of view, you are
> > "cheating". ... If the two of you get together and
> > agree that whoever bids first gets it, and he gets it for $25, you
> > have created a great deal for the one who gets it, at the cost of (in
> > a way) cheating the seller out of what he deserved.
>
>Neil
>
>
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>End of Groop Digest, Vol 56, Issue 17
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