At 09:09 PM 1/13/03 +1000, you wrote:
>On Mon, 13 Jan 2003 11:02:07 +0000, Mike Harrison wrote:
>There's a couple of Picstart Plus's buried amongst a load of
>whitegoods & consumer electronics at
>this upcoming auction in Manchester UK
>
>Well I was almost going to find my self a proxy bidder until I saw
>the =A3200 bidding deposit. Still I understand the reason why. Some
>GPS's seem to be there as well.

Same thing around here, generally a $500 bidder's deposit. Keeps
out some of the riff-raff. More to the point, at industrial
auctions you're not allowed to cart stuff off during the auction,
so it wastes all day, and you are often required to add on the
auctioneer's fees in the form of a "buyer's premium". You also
have to pay sales taxes unless you have appropriate exemptions
as a wholesaler. And there are *inevitably* blithering idiots
with large amounts of cash that will pay close to list price for
some of the things you want. The less people the item is useful to,
the better the price you can sometimes get (it only takes two to drive
the price up, though). Sometimes, like auctions of vacuum tube-making
factories in the 1980s, really sophisticated equipment goes for scrap-
metal prices because no one wants it. Sometimes large machinery goes
for less money than it would cost to move it, because every bozo with
a home shop wants a 3000 pound worn out Bridgeport vertical mill, but not
many people  want one that weighs 10 times that and is just as clapped
out. You can get good deals at auctions, but you have to work at it a bit
and not count your time as worth much.

True story: They held a land auction in Hong Kong a few years back and did
not have a bidder's deposit. An old street woman bid against the great
tycoon Li Ka Shing on a piece of property, until he finally folded at
around a billion HK dollars (120 million or so US dollars). Naturally,
she turned out to be penniless so they had to re-auction the property.

Best regards,

Spehro Pefhany --"it's the network..."            "The Journey is the=
 reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

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