I need to vent.
Last month, a listing turned up on eBay for an antique mining catalog in a series I collect. I’m not sure how I feel about calling myself a collector of anything, but it is what it is. Anyway, this was a small trade book, a sort of off-shoot of the main catalogs. I don’t have any of these, and they are mostly curiosities to me because I still haven’t figured out the wacky numbering system the company used. It is from the 1920s, which is cool, because I already have stuff from the late 1930s and early 1940s, and I don’t care for anything after that. But here’s the deal.
I put in an early bid on $30 because that was the lowest offering. When you bid early, you’re playing your hand. It means, “I don’t really care, but hey, whatever”. If you were really serious, you’d wait to the last minute to bid to make sure nobody is there to outbid you. But here’s what happened: immediately that day I was outbid by $1. I kind of sighed, but I really didn’t want to be play games, and my interest level was pegged at $30, so I didn’t bother bidding higher. The other person won the bid, congratulations, I forgot about it.
But I keep my eyes on these and today I saw it relisted…for about $60, double the price, and no bid option.
Fucker.
Now, when you put in a bid and you win, you’re obligated to pay it, but I don’t doubt there are ways to back out if you really need and the seller lets you. But this seller waited about a month (convenient!) and then relisted at a much higher price. If somebody had backed out, it would probably just have been quickly relisted for its original price. That particular bidder had two previous bids from the past month, both with that seller.
I think this person’s a shyster. I bet this guy has a separate account he uses to bid things up when he isn’t getting the prices he wants. He outbid me early on hoping to bid things up, but I never went with it. So when he won his own bid, he quietly put things aside for a month, hoping people would forget, before relisting at a higher price.
He could have gotten my $30 last month, but he decided to get greedy, and now he currently has $0 and an old book he clearly doesn’t want. Hey, maybe somebody will come along and buy it off of him for $60 – another from the series sold for $50 – but probably not, considering nobody else bid on this back when it was $30. If I’m going to pay $60, I’d better be getting 600 pages of trade catalog, I don’t pay that for 40 pages of trade catalog. But hey, I’d pay $30 for 40 pages, as even I understand the transaction has to be worth something.
These people and their old books! “Oh, it’s OLD, it’s worth something!” It’s worth what the market says it’s worth, and right now I AM THE MARKET!
I want to slap this person. Not hard. Just a little spank on the cheeks. You do not resort to unethical selling practices because you aren’t getting the price you want. You list at the price you want. It will sell, or it won’t. If it doesn’t, then you sit down and ask yourself if you need to lower the price. With old books like this, the answer is ‘yes’.
As Robert Bell says, “Any business relationship predicated on a lie, no matter how trivial, will inevitably go downhill from there.” On the one hand, it’s just eBay. The object being sold is an old book. I give you cash, you give me the book. But on the other hand, if my assumption is correct and this person never actually sold the book because they “bought” it from themselves, then they’re a shady jerk, and I probably don’t want to deal with them. But who knows? Maybe months will pass with no sale and they’ll actually wise up and drop the price again, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll buy it from them for $30. But they’ll have wasted several months trying to squeeze blood from the sale.
Or maybe it will sell at this price and evil will triumph. Who knows?
For what it’s worth, that other book I mentioned previously in this blog is still listed at $300. Some people never learn!