pwcc

[Peter_Spaeth]

It is good to see Brent is posting here. Since he is, I certainly hope he will address concerns previously expressed here and elsewhere (1) that his scans are not realistic depictions of the cards being offered but appear overly bright and (2) that high dollar items in his auctions sometimes appear to have bidders with astounding numbers of retractions to their name and/or very high percentages of bidding activity with him, suggesting (at least to me) the possibllity that they are bidding up their own items and retracting once they find out what the high bidder's max was.

[the-illini]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

It is good to see Brent is posting here. Since he is, I certainly hope he will address concerns previously expressed here and elsewhere (1) that his scans are not realistic depictions of the cards being offered but appear overly bright and (2) that high dollar items in his auctions sometimes appear to have bidders with astounding numbers of retractions to their name and/or very high percentages of bidding activity with him, suggesting (at least to me) the possibllity that they are bidding up their own items and retracting once they find out what the high bidder's max was.

Seconded

[calvindog]

I'll put this to the top so it'll make it easier for Brent to click on it when he's looking at the thread he started.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Jeff, it's me and you and a dog named Boo lol.

[WhenItWasAHobby]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

...... that his scans are not realistic depictions of the cards being offered but appear overly bright ......

I wear welder's goggles when I bid on his auctions.

[HRBAKER]

Did I miss anything?

[Sean]

Originally Posted by HRBAKER

Did I miss anything?

You missed a Brown Old Mill back that ended up selling for $51.

Oh wait, it wasn't you who missed it.

[Flintboy]

I have used Brent and his services on several auctions. He has always been straight forward and honest. To accuse him of misdeeds without any hard evidence is sorry. Just my 2 cents.....

[Kenny Cole]

I don't think its unfair in the least to ask for an explanation why there are substantially more people who bid and then retract their bids than in practically any other auction with the possible exception of one. What is unfair is the prolonged silence that is met when that question is asked. IMO, the lack of a response is very problematic.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Kenny there is no need for anyone to be accountable in the age of stuff trumps all. If someone, anyone, has a card on someone's want list in the right holder, it will sell -- possibly for a world record -- whether it's trimmed, otherwise altered, shilled up, whatever. And people will keep coming back for more of the same.

[slipk1068]

The cards are always very bright for sure, and I was under the impression that Brent was on the lookout for shill/retracted bids and policed his auctions to some extent. Thank you Peter for the insight. I will await a response.

D@v1d $h1p$ey

[jhs5120]

Brent does a fantastic job - by far the best avenue to buy/sell sports cards.

Jason

[cyseymour]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

Kenny there is no need for anyone to be accountable in the age of stuff trumps all. If someone, anyone, has a card on someone's want list in the right holder, it will sell -- possibly for a world record -- whether it's trimmed, otherwise altered, shilled up, whatever. And people will keep coming back for more of the same.

If that's true, then why keep complaining about it?

[Peter_Spaeth]

There is always that last ray of hope that things might change, I suppose.

[the-illini]

Originally Posted by cyseymour

If that's true, then why keep complaining about it?

The owner of the auction house posted on here asking for ways to improve his auctions. I think answering these concerns would help improve them. They might get me to bid in his auctions if a card that I wanted appeared there - that wouldn't happen today.

[cyseymour]

Originally Posted by the-illini

The owner of the auction house posted on here asking for ways to improve his auctions. I think answering these concerns would help improve them. They might get me to bid in his auctions if a card that I wanted appeared there - that wouldn't happen today.

I think he just requested feedback on the auction format. He got a little more than he bargained for - which isn't a bad thing, I suppose.

[cyseymour]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

There is always that last ray of hope that things might change, I suppose.

All we can do is try, I guess. This image editing thing is going to be a tough one to combat. Namely because image quality can vary by scanner and it is almost impossible to prove wrongdoing.

I would put Just Collect, Sterling, Mile High, and LOTG in the category of auction houses which DON'T image edit. But it is tough if you see a card you want, not to bid anyways.

[calvindog]

Originally Posted by the-illini

The owner of the auction house posted on here asking for ways to improve his auctions.

Yes, cleaning up any fraud in his auctions might be the best way to improve them.

[Runscott]

Originally Posted by calvindog

Yes, cleaning up any fraud in his auctions might be the best way to improve them.

+1

Some of the 'turn a blind eye' comments are astounding.

[ullmandds]

it seems that fraud/wrongdoing only gets admitted...and under duress...when the gov't comes knocking!

[jhs5120]

What is the solution?

Seriously, this question is always asked in these "witch-hunt" threads, but it is never answered. The silence is deafening.

Brent, at one point your auction pictures looked like someone was tripping on acid and painted a baseball card with an array of highlighters. It's okay to adjust the contrast a little, but you went over board in the past. I think your pictures now look much more realistic and you found an appropriate middle-ground; thank you for listening to our advice.

Also, several auctions appear shilled. I personally don't think there is a solution to this epidemic, but DON'T WORRY, ullmandds, Runscott, Peter_Spaeth and the-illini all have viable solutions for you!

Lets hear it.

[Leon]

Brent (hi Brent) is great to work with as an advertiser. He seems like a nice guy too.
I have bid and won nice cards in his auctions and will continue. That being said, I hope he will consider banning ebayers from his auctions with inordinate amounts of bid retractions. More than about 2 per year is probably unacceptable. So there is at least part of a solution, Pete and Jason.....

[Peter_Spaeth]

I think it's possible to monitor auctions over a certain threshold to check for consignors bidding up their own items, or suspicious patterns of bidding by bidders with huge numbers of retractions in their recent history. I would start there.

[chaddurbin]

Originally Posted by Leon

Brent (hi Brent) is great to work with as an advertiser. He seems like a nice guy too.
I have bid and won nice cards in his auctions and will continue. That being said, I hope he will consider banning ebayers from his auctions with inordinate amounts of bid retractions. More than about 2 per year is probably unacceptable. So there is at least part of a solution, Pete and Jason.....

wouldn't this hurt some of these ebay consignment places? one of the advantages of being a consignor there is how easy it is to shill up your items.

[Leon]

Originally Posted by chaddurbin

wouldn't this hurt some of these ebay consignment places? one of the advantages of being a consignor there is how easy it is to shill up your items.

I don't think it is ever bad to get rid of fraud. Maybe in the short run the numbers will go down a little bit, but in the long run Karma is a MOFO.....just my opinion....

[jhs5120]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

I think it's possible to monitor auctions over a certain threshold to check for consignors bidding up their own items, or suspicious patterns of bidding by bidders with huge numbers of retractions in their recent history. I would start there.

You think it's possible?

You have been complaining about Brent since yesterday on this thread and you're uncertain if there is even a solution to te issue you are protesting?

But okay, your solution is we check the bidding activity on items above a certain threshold for consignors bidding on their own items. That's a start.

Brent currently has 11,318 completed listings on his ebay account spanning 3 auctions. What are we making the threshold? How about $250. I certainly would be sour if I was bid up on a $250 card. There are 2,219 listings above $250. Since each listing started at $.99 they all had anywhere from 20 to 30 bids (sometimes more) and usually around 10 unique bidders. I timed myself looking at each bidder on a single item to determin how many bid retractions they have had and what there bidding pattern was - it took me 2 minutes and 37 seconds. In the end, I do not believe it was shilled. It would take me over 96 hours to go through each auction above our threshold and in the end we would only have a handful of "suspicions". Of course, it would take me much longer to some how cross reference each bidding ID with the consignors information (which isn't possible) and after all that we were able to block MAYBE a dozen accounts.

Now, we're forgetting that the consignor may snipe his auction (so there's nothing we can do about that) and the consignor may create a new account not under his name (which would also make things difficult).

Please, someone walk us through a solution that would be able to solve this whole ordeal.

[AustinMike]

JHS5120 - I like your solution. Keep head buried in sand, claim it can't be fixed, and move on. With that attitude, I guess I can safely assume that you don't bother to ever lock your home or car doors. After all, burglaries happen and you can't stop them, right? So why bother to lock or even close your doors?

Leon had a great solution ... don't allow anyone with 2 or more bid retractions to bid on the auctions. You didn't address that.

How about, don't let anyone with an ebay account created when the card was consigned, or after, bid on the card without contacting the consignment house? That would prevent the consignor from creating a new account simply to bid on his card.

And I'm sure there are other ways to combat the problem other than throwing one's hands in the air and claiming it can't be done.

[jhs5120]

Originally Posted by AustinMike

Leon had a great solution ... don't allow anyone with 2 or more bid retractions to bid on the auctions. You didn't address that.

I did address it. It would take approximately 96 hours to look at the amount of bid retractions for every bidder on every auction (with a threshold above $250). Which is only covering 20% of PWCC's auction. I think we can both agree that isn't a solution.

Originally Posted by AustinMike

How about, don't let anyone with an ebay account created when the card was consigned, or after, bid on the card without contacting the consignment house? That would prevent the consignor from creating a new account simply to bid on his card.

It would take even longer to look up every account creation date and then cross-reference that to when the consignment was received and that would end up being a purely speculative process. Brent might as well quit auctioning items and just work full time trying to nab shillers.

Originally Posted by AustinMike

I'm sure there are other ways to combat the problem other than throwing one's hands in the air and claiming it can't be done.

I agree.

Some of the greatest minds in the hobby frequent this board, I am genuinly interested in hearing a viable solution to the problem.

If we're going to sit at our computers and bash a small business owner, how about we put in a little bit of thought and figure out a solution.

[calvindog]

Jason, why can't Brent tell us his thoughts on these issues instead of you? Doesn't he have more invested in concerns about the fraud that might be occurring in his auctions than you do?

And why are we responsible for cleaning up his auctions? I wasn't aware of that responsibility. I thought our responsibility started and ended with the rules of his auction.

[nolemmings]

If it takes 96 man-hours to check for retracting bidders, then hire help to do just that. As the problem is attacked it should start to get under control, with bid retractors blocked. As for new accounts being prohibited as potential shills, you can simply deny bidders with less than 5 or 10 feedback from bidding unless they get approval–no need to check account creation dates.

And no one said you have to run 12,000 auctions at a time. Turning away consignors (or postponing their orders) may seem like anathema, but the excuse of “I’m making too much money to care how I make it” is a non-starter with me. SHOW SOME INITIATIVE.

[jhs5120]

Originally Posted by calvindog

Jason, why can't Brent tell us his thoughts on these issues instead of you?

I'm not the person to ask that question to.

Originally Posted by calvindog

Doesn't he have more invested in concerns about the fraud that might be occurring in his auctions than you do?

Yes, I would love to hear his take on the whole issue.

Originally Posted by calvindog

And why are we responsible for cleaning up his auctions? I wasn't aware of that responsibility.

If a person comes onto a public forum and "outs" the owner of an auction house for fraudulent activity that is beyond his control, he certainly has the responsibility to offer a solution.

Originally Posted by calvindog

I thought our responsibility started and ended with the rules of his auction.

The rules of Brents auction explicitly forbids the act of shill bidding. If it is OUR responsibility to adhere to these rules then how can we blame Brent for the people who do not listen?

Per PWCC:

The sportscard hobby hinges on the honesty and integrity of the seller. Too often we hear of fraud and other manipulation that serves to undermine the integrity of our hobby. Bidders deserve better, where bidding is 100% legitimate and uninfluenced by manipulations such as fraudulent (shill) bidding by the auction house, consignors, friends of consignors, friends of the auction house, or anyone else who participates insincerely with the sole intention of manipulating the sale price. We do NOT permit shill bidding of any kind and actively police our auctions to prevent such acts from occurring. If we learn that a bidder is questionable, we take action in the form of canceling the bid and blocking a bidder from participating in future auctions.

To preserve the integrity of the bidding process, we believe that eBay is the best forum to host auctions due to the privacy of the eBay platform. Unlike proprietary auction software, eBay’s platform is equally transparent to both the buyer and the seller. We don’t know the value of a bidder’s max bid, nor do our consignors, or anyone else. We've spent the last 15 years on eBay (since 1998) working to garner the trust of collectors and the hobby at large. Rest assured that you can trust our service and can participate in our auctions with the confidence that integrity is our #1 priority.

[steve B]

As a technical issue any seller who does large volume is in a very bad spot.

As JHS said, it's a lot of hours if you do even a basic search for retractions manually. 96 hours is more than two full weeks of labor just to check something basic. Or at $7 an hour $672. Maybe there's enough in the sellers cut to support that, maybe not. Plus those three full time people will need computers to work with.

And it's fairly easy to beat. Just have multiple accounts, one gets banned, but finds the max bids (But not snipes) Another snipes and that's the shill.

Oh yeah, if it takes 96 hours to check bid history, how long will it take to then cancel bids and ban sellers? Figure at least as long. So double your labor cost.

And that still won't really fix it.
say a bidder with 5 retractions bids on 10 items inside the last few seconds and wins them all.
Sure, you can cancel the sale for not following the auction rules and make second chance offers. But that looks fishy as well doesn't it? (Of course it does, we've all discussed it before)


So the solution needs to be a computerized solution.
I don't think Ebay has a feature to proactively block based on retractions.
So whoever wants to do it will have to come up with their own software.
I believe Ebay can be accessed automatically for the info.
That just leaves writing that program, and making adjustments whenever Ebay decides to make a change behind the scenes.

Have you seen what a really good programmer costs?

Ok, now do the math and figure it out from a purely business perspective. Purely business. Will those things add enough to the bottom line to even cover costs? Maybe it will. Maybe more people would bid or would bid more if they knew almost for sure they wouldn't be shilled.
But you need a lot of sales to cover that. If the consignment fee is 20% you need an extra 3300 a week ( 174720 a year plus since I haven't figured fica etc into labor costs)at the absolute minimum. If you're talking about a computer programmer it's more like 300000 to cover a cheap one.(figuring 60K/year, not unusual for a fresh college grad in programming Good experienced ones cost more, much more but may be faster)

Now wait for it......
A month in you get a C+D letter from Ebay because they really don't want you doing that with their customer data. Or maybe they just want a huge license fee. patent trolls start at around 50K, I'm guessing Ebay would want more.

And there goes a few thousand in development costs. Unless it's actually a patent suit, then it's development costs plus a stack of cash.
(I met someone who wrote their own bidding software that accessed customer data and bids to automate sniping within the last second. They got just such a letter from ebay)


Anyone up for it? Someone want to bankroll the project as a bit of commercial software? I know a few people who could get it done.

Anyone want to try to present it on shark tank?

Steve Birmingham

[Peter_Spaeth]

Doug Allen had a Code of Conduct too. See indictment.

[tschock]

Originally Posted by jhs5120

The rules of Brents auction explicitly forbids the act of shill bidding. If it is OUR responsibility to adhere to these rules then how can we blame Brent for the people who do not listen?

Per PWCC:

The sportscard hobby hinges on the honesty and integrity of the seller. Too often we hear of fraud and other manipulation that serves to undermine the integrity of our hobby. Bidders deserve better, where bidding is 100% legitimate and uninfluenced by manipulations such as fraudulent (shill) bidding by the auction house, consignors, friends of consignors, friends of the auction house, or anyone else who participates insincerely with the sole intention of manipulating the sale price. We do NOT permit shill bidding of any kind and actively police our auctions to prevent such acts from occurring. If we learn that a bidder is questionable, we take action in the form of canceling the bid and blocking a bidder from participating in future auctions.

To preserve the integrity of the bidding process, we believe that eBay is the best forum to host auctions due to the privacy of the eBay platform. Unlike proprietary auction software, eBay’s platform is equally transparent to both the buyer and the seller. We don’t know the value of a bidder’s max bid, nor do our consignors, or anyone else. We've spent the last 15 years on eBay (since 1998) working to garner the trust of collectors and the hobby at large. Rest assured that you can trust our service and can participate in our auctions with the confidence that integrity is our #1 priority.

Respectfully, I have to question... "Where have you been?" What you are posting here simply is making Peter and Jeff's point (among others) for them.

This HAS been brought forward in the past and it goes UNANSWERED. It has been brought up again explicitly because Brent has posted to the forum. Peter simply was asking for Brent's response to this.

Either they are doing what they say they are doing (see bold and highlighted) or they are not.

[Peter_Spaeth]

FYI it took me about three minutes to find five (or maybe it was more) suspicious bidders who should be investigated. The stats people throw up in an effort to make this seem more overwhelming than putting a man on the moon don't impress me much.

[tschock]

Originally Posted by steve B

I don't think Ebay has a feature to proactively block based on retractions. - Steve Birmingham

You are correct. They do not.

This whole situation could be easily solved by ebay allowing/exposing the bid retraction number on their "excluded sellers" option list. Similar to they way they allow you to set minimum feedback requirements for bidders who you can prohibit from bidding.

[jhs5120]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

FYI it took me about three minutes to find five (or maybe it was more) suspicious bidders who should be investigated. The stats people throw up in an effort to make this seem more overwhelming than putting a man on the moon don't impress me much.

What type of "investigation" do you wish Brent would conduct on these 5 suspicious bidders?

[glchen]

I agree, I think Brent is in a bad spot because of volume. (Same with other large ebay consignors like Probstein.) However, I do think there are some solutions.

The most obvious would be if ebay would actually get off their butt and help out here. First, ebay can make the bidding id's public. Then everyone can see the actual bidding id's. Next, beside the bidding id in the bidding history, ebay can place the location (City/State) of the bidder. Therefore, if a bidder create fake id's, you can see it b/c of the location of the bidder. However, how about those bidders who fake their location? You can require that the location be mapped to a confirmed shipping address from paypal. In addition, ebay can require that all bidders have paypal accounts. (or if ebay does not, PWCC can in their auctions require that all bidders have valid paypal accounts.) In their paypal accounts, ebay/paypal can require that all accounts have confirmed bank accounts linked to them. This way, it won't be as easy for bidders to create fake accounts, and ebay/paypal can make sure that the account name on the bank account matches the account name on the ebay account along w/ the location. This way there would be more transparency for potential bidders to see what's going on in the bidding history for an auction, and ebay would be able to catch shill bidding much easier. Even if someone is having a friend bid for them, it would be much more difficult if they're near the same location. Obviously, there would still be loopholes if the friend or dealer friend is in a different state.

Another thing that ebay can add is as part of the Buyer Requirements, add a requirement for bidding retractions where if a buyer has a certain number of retractions in the last year, prevent them from bidding in the auction. Then sellers can use this auction to help prevent shilling.

Everything I mentioned is pretty much for ebay. Obviously with so many auctions, it's tough for PWCC to police every one of them. However, perhaps they could participate in some of the threads more openly, and post the actual bidding history of auctions when asked. Basically if certain auctions were questioned, they could investigate those auctions openly as needed, which would help ensure the public that no funny business were going on.

[cyseymour]

Ebay's auction system was never designed for the type of consignments that are taking place. It was originally designed so that people could sell their own items. It worked well for a while, although there was plenty of fakes and scams. Yet now we have the rampant shill bidding as consigners bid up their own items.

You have sellers such as PWCC, Probstein, Just Collect, etc, and then you have the auction houses. Either way, you are not immune to shill bidding - from the consigners on the ebay auction, or with the auction house itself. Even if the auction house is not shill bidding, a consigner could have a friend bid on the card (although there often is no issue with retractions).

Inevitably, everyone is exposed to fraud and dishonesty. PWCC/Prob/JC need to do a better job of monitoring their auctions, but an even greater problem is the image editing. This is the new steroids for baseball cards vis-a-vis the auction houses. Shill bidding has become too risky in the wake of the Mastro arrests, so image editing is the new way to inflate prices.

[Leon]

The part of the solution I was talking about takes about 3 seconds. Check someone's bid history, if more than 2 retractions a year, ban them. I don't give a rat's ass where they did the retractions. I am all inclusive of any ebay auction. That is a workable partial solution.

If we found a cure for breast cancer would we take it now or wait until all cancer is curable?

[tschock]

Originally Posted by jhs5120

What type of "investigation" do you wish Brent would conduct on these 5 suspicious bidders?

Jeez, you posted this yourself.

If we learn that a bidder is questionable, we take action in the form of canceling the bid and blocking a bidder from participating in future auctions.

[calvindog]

Time spent by potential victims of fraud in PWCC auctions discussing solutions to fraud = much

Time spent by owner of PWCC auctions discussing solutions to fraud = 0

[CaramelMan]

No Auction house will stop Shill bidding!

IT MAKES THEM MONEY to have shill bids

IT COSTS THEM MONEY to Police it....

sorry folks...it will never stop....

EBAY LOVES SHILL BIDDING....they have meetings every month to talk about how they can further HIDE shill bidding for their customers...

its like beating a dead horse....IT WILL NEVER END...part of buying something over the computer....

[glchen]

Originally Posted by CaramelMan

No Auction house will stop Shill bidding!

IT MAKES THEM MONEY to have shill bids

IT COSTS THEM MONEY to Police it....

sorry folks...it will never stop....

EBAY LOVES SHILL BIDDING....they have meetings every month to talk about how they can further HIDE shill bidding for their customers...

its like beating a dead horse....IT WILL NEVER END...part of buying something over the computer....

This argument really reminds me of steroids in baseball...

The FANS love the home runs and offense!
The OWNERS love increased gate revenue and higher TV contracts!
The PLAYERS love their names in the record books and the higher salaries from increased revenue!

The "only" people who get hurt are the players who don't want to take steroids but find that they are not able to get a job in MLB b/c of all of the steroid users producing better numbers.

It's the same thing in this situation. Consignors, even honest ones, will flock to those auction houses that seem to bring the highest prices. So the honest auctioneers will tend to get less consignments. Those consignors who don't shill will get lower prices on their consignments, which may be flipped by consignors who do shill, inflating the VCP average. Then honest buyers see these average selling prices and think that these are the prices they can sell their cards in the future, but it's all a mirage created by this shilling.

[CaramelMan]

Originally Posted by glchen

This argument really reminds me of steroids in baseball...

The FANS love the home runs and offense!
The OWNERS love increased gate revenue and higher TV contracts!
The PLAYERS love their names in the record books and the higher salaries from increased revenue!

The "only" people who get hurt are the players who don't want to take steroids but find that they are not able to get a job in MLB b/c of all of the steroid users producing better numbers.

It's the same thing in this situation. Consignors, even honest ones, will flock to those auction houses that seem to bring the highest prices. So the honest auctioneers will tend to get less consignments. Those consignors who don't shill will get lower prices on their consignments, which may be flipped by consignors who do shill, inflating the VCP average. Then honest buyers see these average selling prices and think that these are the prices they can sell their cards in the future, but it's all a mirage created by this shilling.

not saying I agree with shilling..its very bad ..BUT and this is a big BUT:

THERE IS NO INCENTIVE TO STOP....and a big incentive to continue to shill...

IMPOSSIBLE TO STOP IT, that is the problem..

how many theads has Probstein been subject of for letting shill bidders consign with him...its never ending and he has no incentive to stop it!

even when they are caught red handed (as been shown here plenty of times) THEY DONT STOP.....

actually I think they get more brazen AFTER the get caught and have no repercussions....

[the-illini]

Originally Posted by calvindog

Time spent by owner of PWCC auctions discussing solutions to fraud = 0

The above is significantly less than the time spent by owner on this forum soliciting feedback to help improve his bottom line.

[Iron Horse]

If a few of them are fined & jailed then that would be a BIG incentive to stop. Until that time...let the shilling roll. Seriously, unless arrests and/or fines are presented this will likely not end.

[Leon]

Originally Posted by CaramelMan

not saying I agree with shilling..its very bad ..BUT and this is a big BUT:

THERE IS NO INCENTIVE TO STOP....and a big incentive to continue to shill...

IMPOSSIBLE TO STOP IT, that is the problem..

how many theads has Probstein been subject of for letting shill bidders consign with him...its never ending and he has no incentive to stop it!

even when they are caught red handed (as been shown here plenty of times) THEY DONT STOP.....

actually I think they get more brazen AFTER the get caught and have no repercussions....

First of all, be careful of our full name policy. Secondly, just curious who has been caught shill bidding and didn't stop or got more brazen? The incentive to stop is prison.

[D. Bergin]

You cannot police every auction of every bidder and weed out who is a serial retractor or not.

It really doesn't matter anymore. It's not just shillers who are doing this, it's bidders who have decided this is a great bidding strategy for them to suss out the high bid.

You can however, very easily weed out the bidders who are placing retractions in YOUR auctions. Every time somebody retracts a bid in one of your auctions, you receive an e-mail from Ebay telling you this. It's not rocket science and it's not time consuming. A couple circumstances like this happening in YOUR auctions, you do a little investigating, you confront the bidder with a message, and then you cut the bidder off at the knees or find out he has a tremendously valid reason for doing what he did.

[Wahoowa]

Originally Posted by the-illini

The above is significantly less than the time spent by owner on this forum soliciting feedback to help improve his bottom line.

Just to clarify, Brent is soliciting feedback because I had reached out to him expressing my concerns with the new mid-day closing time. Sure it helps his bottom line but he seemed genuinely interested in addressing my concerns as a buyer/consignor.