3.99 vase sells for $100,000
 

Following up on an earlier thread about a similar situation. Does it make a difference to anyone that it was a thrift store that "got took?" Should the thrift store sue?

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/boug...171323818.html

What basis would the thrift store have to win a lawsuit? It sounds they offered an item for sale and someone bought it...

Sue for what? Sue somebody because they didn’t research an item and chose to price it at $3.99? I do not understand the popular desire of today to sue other people for one’s own conscious choices. ‘If I don’t like something I myself chose to do I get to sue someone else and make them pay me for my poor choices’. :rolleyes:

Why would the thrift store have any claim to an item it willingly sold? How exactly would that work?

I'm a retailer suing a customer for purchasing my goods? I don't think so.

I bought a$10 book from ABEbooks and sold it for $600. Shouldn't I be getting a summons?

Legal questions aside, thinking about things practically, who would purchase anything from a retailer that sues it's customers for being customers?

I guess the question is at what delta could a lawsuit be implemented? I mean I need to sue some of you guys LOL!

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...c6a35d19fc.gif

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Purchased many items from flea markets, etc, that’s how it works, buy for the price asked, keep in your collection or sell for another price. No lawsuit here.

I'm not saying there should or shouldn't be a lawsuit. Apparently nobody in this thread read the African Mask thread a month or so ago? I'm asking if there is a difference in the situations.

im familiar with the african mask incident. This situation is different. Goodwill received the object for free...priced it and put it up for sale. Someone bought it and sold for a profit.

Nothing to see here. No grounds for lawsuit.

I recall that thread. I don't get how a lawsuit could even be entertained here. A business got an item, sold it for a profit, and then the buyer made a huge profit by bothering to put in some work and research. Do you think there's a real debate on if making a profit from something you buy from a seller who set the price should result in a successful civil lawsuit?

Would you sue one of your customers who sold a card they got from you for a profit? How would that be any different than this case?

If a business exists to sell second hand items and it sues you for purchasing one of its second hand items, how can that business expect to survive? Wouldn't every customer of it assume they'll be sued?

Can I assume I can sue if I sell the same item at a loss?

Resellers are seemingly 75%+ of Goodwill's sales of late, it's become their business model.

This one just did better than most in one shot. Watching the YouTube channels of some of these resellers, they make far, far more than this profit over a year's time.

OK, I'll say it again, I'm not saying they should be sued.

I'm more of the opinion that the African mask situation is very similar. Somebody sold something, ostensibly without being under duress and of sound mind, able to execute a contract. What difference is there if it's a business or a private sale?

Conversely, a $100,000 vase sold for $3.99...so there's that.

Oh, NM...

If I remember correctly the original sellers of the African mask sought out an opinion from the person who ultimately bought it from them. I would think that’s where the contention lies for a lawsuit. The accusation that the “expert” gave bogus advice so he could buy something cheaply he knew was valuable.

Not saying that happened of course, only that I think that’s the only avenue for a suit in the mask’s case.

3.99 vase sells for $100,000


To me it sounds like someone paid $99,996 too much for a vase.


Brian (I collect expensive cardboard)

Not quite. An article by Adam Schrader on Art Net News on October 3, 2023, summarizes the issue perfectly, so I will just quote it (I am going to omit the paragraph breaks and leave out some of the extraneous details):

“A legal case making its way through the French court system is raising questions about whether a person who has sold an artwork or artifact later determined to have a much higher value can seek further compensation. An unnamed 81-year-old woman and her 88-year-old husband came across an African mask while clearing out their second home. While most of the contents of the home went into a garage sale, they decided to sell the mask to a local antiques dealer, who agreed to buy the mask for €150, or about $157, in September 2021. Months later, they discovered through reading the newspaper that their mask had just made €4.2 million ($4.4 million) at a specialized auction in Montpellier. ... The couple launched suit against the antiques dealer, who they believe cheated them. ... The couple’s argument hinges on the suspicion that the dealer had a good idea of the true value of the object when he bought it from them. The antiques dealer did not display the mask at his shop and instead contacted the auction houses Drouot Estimation and Fauve Paris, which estimated it to be worth about €100–€120, and €400–€600 respectively. Despite these valuations given by two auctioneers, he went on to seek a third opinion from a specialized sale of African objects in Montpellier. After ordering analysis using carbon-14 dating and mass spectrometry, the mask was dated to the 19th century and an ethnologist’s expert appraisal revealed it was used for purification rites by the Ngil society, a secret society that operated within the Fang ethnic group in Gabon until the 1920s. The auction house placed the mask for sale with an estimate of between €300,000 and €400,000. The mask was sold for €4.2 million, about $4.4 million, at an auction in March 2022.”

He sounds like a smart professional who took a risk, and it paid off. Hell, the experts he consulted had views that put the value of the mask in line with what he paid for it, and it was only after a lot more homework and testing that he got a crazy good outcome.

More to the point, philosophically speaking, even assuming that the dealer knew he was looking at a very valuable object, I do not think he had a duty to tell the sellers anything. Anyone with expertise has probably worked his butt off to get to that level of knowledge and has a right, in our hyper-capitalist society, to use it to profit. Nor do I think people with equal bargaining power (not knowledge, bargaining power) have anything to bitch about when the counterparty has superior knowledge and uses it to advantage. An expert has no reason to give up that advantage in an arms' length transaction. I heard about a similar situation over the weekend, $25 item morphing into a $50K item when a smart buyer figured it out. I am jealous but not critical. My only complaint is that I wasn't the one who found the golden ticket.

The vase deal is the mirror of that situation: the professional was blind without a cane and the buyer was canny. More power to her.

Yeah. My recollection is that the bigger argument was the ethics of getting a deal that's too good. Based on the discussion, for some of the posters, buying a million dollar piece for $100 constitutes a moral failing on the part of the purchaser.

Of course, we also had lots of exciting hypotheticals, and some pushing to attempt to figure out where the ethicists draw the line between getting a good deal and acting unethically. I even shared somewhat of a similar situation where I recently purchased an item for somewhere between 1% and 10% of its value, and the overwhelming response was basically that I got a good deal, and shouldn't worry about it.

My recollection is that the potential for bad karma was also a factor.

I can only find one post in the original thread saying this kind of suit should be acceptable.

Most of the original thread is a guy calling anyone who gets a huge bargain without telling the seller what they have and using their knowledge for the sellers gain a "huge piece of shit" and the resulting virtue signaling debate. There was not really any debate over anything remotely approaching either the mask case or this vase.

1 single person thought a suit was reasonable. I still do not get why we are bringing this up as if there is any legitimate debate whatsoever. :rolleyes:

Plenty of people seemed to have some qualms about the original situation.

Even you had a quote there:

"One should not rip people off for ethical reasons..."

Of course, you then went on to argue that you shouldn't be obligated to use your knowledge to benefit someone else.

And then there were also a handful of posts about how people believed it was appropriate to cut the seller into your deal if you're able to make good money on your flip.

One should not be rude to their neighbors. That doesn't mean I believe I can sue my neighbor who forgets to bring a casserole to the neighborhood potluck. I am unable to find anyone besides our regular singular troll arguing in favor of a suit of the nature in discussion.

Fair enough!

Still seems like we argued for a while about it, all things considered.

And maybe we haven't plumbed the depths of the various ethical hypotheticals yet, which is why we need another thread to help us flesh it out further.

Perhaps we can even sue each other to create months of drama for the board.

Be careful!

I might just sue myself next.

OK Bruce(s) :D

I feel sorry for the thrifter's significant other because now that thrifter is now armed with 10's of thousands of dollars that can be spent on thrift store "stuff". In a matter of months, their house will be filled with useless crap that will probably be donated to the thrift store from which it was purchased when the thrifter's life ticket finally gets punched.

The way I see it, if someone has an item for sale and is asking for guidance for the sale of the item and someone knowingly misrepresents their knowledge about an item they know is very valuable (hides the information in an effort to obtain the item), then I think there should be an avenue for legal recourse.

On the flip side, if something's for sale and the seller has a set price on it, then it is what it is. You would hope that if someone buys the item knowing they were going to flip it quick for a great profit, then the person buying the item could return and share some of the windfall. Call it good karma. I wouldn't look at it as obligatory.

Honestly, how many of you would inform the seller of the actual value of a box of T206's (that haven't seen the light of day for decades) if someone was selling them at a yard sale for a "steal" of a price?

If you're an expert and give false or deceptive information to a non-expert/average Joe in setting the sale price, you can get in trouble.

If someone puts a price sticker on something at a store or sale and you buy it at that price, there's no crime.

I volunteer at a cancer charity thrift shop where all the items are donated. We know that some items are bought for resale. Not only is that a win-win, but one of these resellers is our best customer.

I agree, but the African Mask story, at least my reading of it, didn't seem like deception.

Goodwill
 

Goodwill should be OK with this. You can't buy this much National exposure in the news and on TV for $107,000.

Nobody should be able to sue in such an instance when the "fault" rests squarely on the shoulders of their own ignorance.

Goodwill isn't about to outsource for expert appraisals on every potential item of value that comes their way. That's laughable. Just think of how many incredible thrift store finds we've read about over the years. For every one of these, there are millions of items of almost zero value that get sold by thrift stores. It's the constant turning over of that "junk" that keeps their operations more than viable.

Moral failure, probably. Legal remedy, highly unlikely.

You said if there was already a price then so be it. :) I am guessing not a lot of people would tell.

This.