This looks interesting indeed

[vintagechris]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

Dan -- fear of backlash. I know this from private communications. EDIT TO ADD If H&S were really "shilling" HOC wouldn't be winning anything -- it would just be a house account used to bump other bidders to their max bids.

I disagree with you Peter. You are basically saying if someone is shilling auctions, the shill account never wins. That is just simply not true. As for the change in bidding rules now, IMO they basically had no choice, So i guess I am in the boat of they didn't do anything so great by changing to this.

I feel like what they did in the beginning was wrong. I believe H&S and HOC are the same company, and for them to have been bidding on items was running bids up against loyal customers who have been doing business with them for years.

Call me old school, but I am also in the camp that when someone owns a business and there is a problem with a customer, the business owner should apologize to the customer, there was never an apology for this or really an explanation as to why they felt this was right, other than HOC pays the buyers premium as well.

I had what I felt like was a major issue with H&S once, when I called to voice my concern, there was no apology from the person who answered the phone, to me, he didn't seem to care about the issue at all, he did allow me to send the item back for a refund and when I asked if they could cover what it would cost to ship it back, the person helping me seemed irritated that I would even ask that because as he said, it only costs $15 to ship.

Well, that didn't exactly make me feel like a valued customer. Not only did I feel like I had irritated this person for bringing this issue up, but there was never any explanation for how this could have happened in the first place and no assurance was made to me to make me believe it couldn't or wouldn't happen again.

In all fairness, it was not Josh or Bill that handled this issue, maybe they would have handled it better. I don't know if they ever even knew of the issue. I would think they would have been informed of it. To me, it just seemed like no one there really cared too much that there was what I felt was a major issue and to me it had a feel of being swept under the rug.

Chr....s S-hr.. e--ve