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It's a damn shame that I can't go out and buy the muscle car of my dreams for $5,000, but I sure as hell wouldn't sell that same car for any less than the maximum amount that I could get for it. Life is just unfair.
Is this horse dead yet?
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Bill,
When you're selling a car do you charge $350 per viewer to LOOK at it? Do you make others stand 150 ft. back and pay $100 to LOOK at it?
Do you have trained monkeys in the crowd who have been taught how to say the right things to increase your buyers' enthusiasm and heighten the emotion around the sale of your car?
Do you put it on a stage with bright lights and celebs in order to DRIVE the bids to an unbelievably inflated price?
Do you have a bunch of cheerleaders, including "Satan of the Car Hobby," screaming for the potential buyers to up their bids?
It's a bunch of smoke and mirrors, it's destroying our hobby and NO, the horse has not been beat to death because there are guys who refuse to believe it's "OK" to get as much as you can for a car.
This is why MOST of us have "asking prices." We try to sell our cars at fair market value.
How do we NORMALLY treat scheisters on eBay who try to sell cars at inflated value?
We make fun of them and call them crooks.
Or don't we?
Did you see the Dec. '04 issue of Hot Rod Magazine? (On Page 20 under "Royally Ripped Off".)
A guy in Omaha paid an elderly woman $200 for her '31 Ford, an Evinrude outboard and a Hiawatha Bike.
The guy had gloated over his windfall deal, but the reader's took issue with him and the fact that he took advantage of an 80+ yr old woman. They encouraged him to go back and give her a fair payment for her items!
Sure, this hobby is about our cars, but it's also about respect for one another. I have never been to any car shows or meets where the classic cars guys weren't simply the nicest, fairest people around.
So, isn't paying too little and being duped into paying too much EQUALLY as wrong? Isn't "honesty" a part of what we all desire in our hobby?
How do you think our hobby will look in 10 years if a bunch of snooty, self-indulgent, over-bearing, swingin' dicks - who've never turned a wrench in their entire lives - start trailer-queening their cars into our meetings?
It will become more and more presumptuous and cold... and I, for one, will protest this until the day I die.
This is a hobby of "good guys."
Not for a bunch of overpaid stockbrokers who will look down their noses at us as they take all their plastic trophies home.
(No offends to stockbrokers here, just an example!)
Again, though... this is ONLY my opinion!
Mac
..waiting to be slapped...
