Posted By:
runscottIf someone buys an item for $10 that they think is worth $50, then sells it to you for $100, and you know it's worth $1,000, did you do something morally wrong? I don't think so. Should you have told them that their price tag of $100 was too low? Puh-leazzzeee, gimme a break here - maybe you wouldn't have taken their deal, but I would have.
Antique dealers buy piles of photos, cards, etc. all the time for practically nothing, then sell them on ebay not knowing what they had, but still make a tidy profit....that's because they sell JUNK for a living and know nothing about rare photos or cards - is it my job to train them in my field? No, and it isn't their job to train me how to buy and sell junk. They buy in bulk knowing that an occasional gem will slip through, but they still make their profit and don't care to invest the time to to educate themselves so that they can identify every single measly item they buy and sell. Basically, they made a choice, and it involved bulk.
An example is the Mathewson cabinet that you and I were involved in - the owner was happy to sell it for $5 on ebay, having paid far less than that for it as part of a larger lot of photographs. I offered $700, which she accepted, then backed out of the deal after apparently receiving additional information from another source. Of course she did - she never invested the time to educate herself to be an expert at vintage baseball player cabinet photos!
Could she have sold it for what she got on Mastro without my intervention? Of course not - she's not in the business of selling unique Matty cabinet photos - she sells JUNK! If I hadn't offered her $700, she would never have contacted you the expert authenticator, someone would have quietly won the item on ebay for far less, and she would still have made a nice profit, and been perfectly happy. In fact, the extra money she would have made off of that single photo because 2-3 knowledgeable EDUCATED collectors realized it was Matty, probably would have made her pleased as punch.
...oh, and another thought - do you think after Mastro sent her the auction check she went back to the original seller and offered to share the profit?