I'm sorry but that is an idiotic argument. eBay provides tools for the seller to insure a minimum price is met. If the seller chooses to lay >bare his auction items to market forces with no reserve then they can't blame anyone >for it selling at a lower price than they may have foreseen. Agreed?The same argument technique was used by a friend in my youth who stole: if the store has no provisions for preventing me from doing it, then it's their fault. I'm not attempting to say that you are advocating stealing, but only that this justification isn't that successful.
Rob Studdert
Minimum price auctions often don't do as well, so sellers sometime choose not to do them. I don't use them when I sell simply because I know I find them annoying as a buyer.
Anyway, I'm not so concerned about the specifics and technical mechanisms of such things, but only about the sham ethics of pretending that the buyer is the only one who counts, that therefore enabling others to "steals" is per se a good thing, and that inflating an auction to even a reasonable price is always terrible. Why sympathize with other buyers and not other sellers? Not posting to the list sometimes hurts sellers and sometimes helps buyers - so...? I can understand if you are happy to see Walmart as a seller get ripped off by some poor buyer, but that's not usually what we're talking about anyway.
Someone on here a while back posted that anyone who has the high bid a few hours before an auction close is "a fool" or words to that effect and that bidding early on is so terrible because it inflates the price for those wonderful geniuses among us who bid within 10 miliseconds of the end of an auction. Amazing how people inflate their own behavior to morally absolute conditions - particularly when the behavior isn't especially nice. I bid early in auctions simply because I don't like playing games. I like to establish also that I want the item and want it for a certain price - then someone can top me if he wants and everything is on the table. If someone has already bid on something I often don't bid if I know the item comes around a lot because I figure the buyer may really want it, and need it soon. If the bid is low, I often will bid, however. None of this is set in stone from an ethical standpoint, though I try to act "nicely" as a buyer and seller in general, rather than just getting the best deal or best price for myself.
Anyway, there has never been agreement on the list on ebay issues apart from the imaginary gentleman's agreement in the minds of a few listers, a small minority of who is out there.
Rob
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