Quote:
Originally Posted by Snowman
As far as calling them out, I disagree. This sort of behavior is rampant in this hobby and it's completely inexcusable. They did what they did, and bidders should be made aware of it. And this wasn't the only card they did it with either. I have another, much more expensive card that had an even more in-depth description, but which also omitted the fact that there were multiple creases on it. In fact, I would say that the description of the other card was so precise that it could be effectively interpreted as "there are no creases on this card". Yet it arrived with multiple hidden creases as well.
They have an opportunity to make this right. If they do, then I will certainly be sharing that information. People make mistakes. But when auction houses do wrong by their customers, that information needs to be shared with the community.
|
I think there are often two competing concerns here.
One concern is that the auction house should have a chance to address this issue before it's made public. I think we can all agree that auction houses are generally great, but are also fallible, and sometimes will make mistakes. And when it happens, I suspect that the AH prefers not to be publicly embarrassed by a mistake. We all make mistakes, yet I suspect none of us is really excited about having those mistakes paraded around in public, even when they're true.
On the other side, if an AH makes a mistake, to what extent is it important for the broader collecting community to understand what happened so that we can be aware of the situation, and take appropriate precautions ourselves? Certainly we rightfully expect that AHs are experts on the pieces they are auctioning, the stuff is authentic, accurately represented and described. If the AH isn't meeting that standard, then it seems like the sort of thing that the full industry should care about, to make sure that we're able to protect ourselves against the same sort of situation in the future, but also as a means to help to police the AHs and keep them honest.
Not to make this about me, although I clearly can't help myself, but I had something similar happen to me a few years ago. I won an auction from a major AH (not ML) for a collection of items that all turned out to be fake. And not even good fakes, but very obvious and stupid fakes, as they were fantasy pieces with a number of the backs printed on kodak paper, with the kodak logo and everything. As luck would have it, the backs that were printed on kodak paper weren't shown in the pics on the AH listing.
Similar to Travis, I posted about it here, both because I thought the community should know, and because I wanted to push the AH to act on it. And the response to my post was somewhat similar: some thought I should have waited a while longer before posting to give the AH a chance to fix it before I went public, and others supported me and found the mistakes of the AH to be deeply troubling.
I'm not here to re-litigate my experience working through that process with that AH, although I'm happy to report that the AH addressed the issue and refunded my payment. I'm hopeful that Travis will have a similarly positive outcome.