Some musings regarding eBay...

[hvychev]

Wow where do I start. Well first I can say that I agree with you Garnet about a few things. First as we all know prices for muscle cars/supercars and their memorabilia have gotten out of control. I am a young muscle car enthusiast and love the cars but am growing to love the memorobilia even more. I have collected a respectable number of things and have aspirations to collect even more rare and neat peices of history.

With that said, I contribute the current "state" of our passion to the internet and especially e-bay. The days of advertising cars and parts to a small local audience are over. When a new car or part is advertised now you have a captive audience of the whole WORLD. Wow isn't that weird to think about? When you advertise lets say a NOS Nickey Chevrolet parts catalog now anybody that is sitting in front of a computer can just do a general search under Nickey and come up with anything that has the word Nickey as a keyword in the auction and could bid on it. The reason you get an inflated price is lets say that I want that particular catalog I saw on e-bay while surfing the web in Chicago to complete my collection of Nickey catalogs and bid a large amount (to me at least which would be my opinion of market value) of $200.00. Now you sitting on your computer across the big pond look up that same catalog and may be in a better financial postion than me and need that peice to add to your collection and say "man that catalog is worth $300.00 to me" so you bid on it. Now I am out and you are the high bidder. Now to even add more to this rant that I am on, another jerk is sitting in let's say for conversation California and sees that same catalog as he is chilling with his dog surfing the web [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] and decides that he could pay $400.00 for that darn catalog that was originally $1.00 brand new! HE WINS NOW WE HAVE A REDICULES INFLATED PRICE! I think that you all get my point! This stuff pisses me off but that is the modern age that we live in. I just hope that I can keep up with the inflation so I can keep doing what I love.

Now for the private auctions. I have seen public auctions do harm lately. I myself hated private auctions since their are a few rotten apples that have spoiled the whole bunch. Did you guys look at the bid history for the now "infamous" Berger plate frames auction? I think that almost if not all of the bidders were members of this site one way or another. Now we are all competeing for the same stuff and grudges may form because you outbid me. That sucks. I lost a neat Nickey poster board that I REALLY wanted to camarojoe and even spent stupid money IMO. But like I told him "All's fair in love and war." He was just willing to spend more. Thats life.

Guys bottom line is we have to be careful what we say on this site sometimes. That person that we bash could be a friend and we don't even know it. Camarojoe is one of our friends. He contributes a lot to the supercar hobby by lugging 20 tables of memorabilia across the country on his own buck to The Supercar Reunion just for our enjoyment. We all love to see all that neat stuff we have probably never seen before. He isn't a vendor selling anything at the show, just a guy like us that loves supercars and wants to share his part of them with the rest of us. If he buys a part and makes profit god bless! I am sure that he justs reinvests it back into lets say for example $610.00 Berger plate frames. [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/eek.gif[/img] I for one bid with confidence when I participate in his auctions. Like supercar kid said. If you don't like the way an auction looks, or the current price, don't bid on it!