It's your option to do as you please of course. But try to remember that auctions and most auction practices including starting bids and reserves are FAR, far older that eBay.
Real live auctions have even more potentially entertaining/annoying/complicating wrinkles. Phone bids, proxy bids, professional bidders hired by others, all sorts of stuff.
What's the point in complaining about a standard business practice? I hate it that since bar codes and scanners most stores don't put price tags on anything. I know it save them a ton of labor but I really dislike wandering the store looking for scanners that only work half the time to find out how much stuff costs. I hate it but I'm not likely to change Wal-Mart's mind about the way they do business. I only choose whether I shop there or not.
Yeah, you should see some of the monkeyshines I've seen at the ag auctions... including one from my Dad's best friend Frank (when he was growing up anyway).
Frank was a strange fellow. I was teamed up with him baling hay on his place and we split the hay. Well, he decided to sell his old 1456 IH tractor. We drove his tractor to the auction and dropped it off, and I drove him back, and he was bragging that it was worth like $8,000, from what he'd seen other similar tractors going for at auction. Well, those were for real nice tractors, let's just say his was "rode hard and put up wet". Well, we headed over there on auction day for the auction, and went over to his tractor when the auctioneer worked his way up to it. A guy bids to like $3300, and Frank keeps bidding against him. The guy bid to $3500, and Frank upped him again, and he turned around and walked off, so Frank got his tractor back. The next month, we went over there again for the sale. Before the sale, we noticed a young farmer about 25 or so looking at the tractor pretty closely with his Dad who was about 60 or so. When the bidding started, he and his Dad and a few others were bidding, and they dropped off one by one until it was just the kid and his Dad and Frank still bidding. The kid bid it up to $5500, and Frank upped it again and they shook their heads and wouldn't bid up so Frank bought his own tractor AGAIN! On the way home, Frank was griping about the commissions he owed the auction company on the last two sales. The next month, we went back, and it didn't look very promising, as it was mostly 'traders' walking around... the kind of guys wearing big cowboy hats and fancy boots and driving big diesel pickups, who don't farm but hit all the sales and bid the prices up on all the older equipment that a little 'poor' farmer like me would like to buy and fix up to use on the place, but they bid it up and snatch it out from under you, take it home, slap a coat of paint on it and double the price and then expect you to pay for it and STILL have to do the mechanical repairs on it before you can really use it. They're also notorious for buying big high-dollar equipment like tractors and pickers and combines dirt cheap, if there aren't any farmers there that actually need the stuff to outbid them. Well, nothing much in the crowd but traders today. They work around to Frank's tractor, and sure enough, nothing but traders bidding, and Frank bids it up to $3200, and one of the traders he's bidding against gets a sour look on his face but bids up to $3300, and the auctioneer ups it and Frank kinda looks despondent and lets it go. Later on at the office, he settles up for the $800 in commissions he owes from the three sales and gets his check for $2500, which is a $1000 less than the first guy bid three weeks before, and less than half what the kid had bid the week before! They didn't do reserves, so Frank decided to 'up the bids'. Sometimes you can outsmart yourself...
We (other farmers I talked to) were pretty universal in our hatred of the 'traders'... I nearly bought a 40 year old farm implement one time-- somebody had pulled it out of the weeds and it still had vines and canes stuck on top of it that had grown over it and pulled out of the ground when they brought it to the auction. It needed some bearings and the rust busted, bolts replaced, a few missing dirt scrapers and stuff like that, nothing major, but definitely a couple weeks repair work and a few hundred dollars in parts to get it going. Well, I knew what similar machinery was going for on the used lot at the tractor dealer, and figured what I could pay for it and still come out after buying parts, to have a better machine than what's on the used lot at the dealers... sometimes the stuff they have is more worn out than auction stuff, sometimes a little better but priced five times higher than the auction. I could go to like $700 I figured, as the dealer would have one, if I could find one, for $1000-$1200 in decent shape. A stupid jerk trader who was buying everything he could lay his hands on swooped in and bid it up to $900 or so. So I shook my head and walked off. Thing was, this particular jerk we knew, and sure enough, within two weeks of the sale the same machine was in front of his place with a 'for sale' sign on it. I stopped and looked for grins and all he had done was pull the vines and canes off, shoot a coat of TSC implement paint on it, and put it by the road with a for sale sign on it for $1100... what a crock! The same bearings that needed replacing and parts that needed fixing hadn't been touched and would still need repair before the tool could be used...
Traders finally drove that auction out of business-- farmers wouldn't hardly come because the traders would outbid them on all the 'cheap equipment' they wanted to buy cheap and fix up, and other farmers wouldn't bring big ticket items because there were so few farmers coming and the traders would 'steal' the big stuff dirt cheap... they were broke and gone within two years... OL JR
