A Player Passing Away & Selling Etiquette

[glynparson]

When other people
Start paying your bills they can start telling you when you should or shouldn’t sell something. Until then do what you are comfortable with.

[lowpopper]

Sell immediately. It’s memorabilia, not crime scene evidence or anything directly correlated to their passing. Don’t let others guilt you into not selling something when it’s hot.

[rhettyeakley]

Not really an ethical dilemma in my opinion. I know that as soon as a player passes away any autographs that I have in my ebay store get snatched up super fast. I learned that Al Kaline had passed away a little while ago as between working on patients I happened to look at my phone and noticed I had sold 5-6 different signed Kaline cards within a 15 minute period and didn't even have to look at the news, I knew what that meant. Same thing happened the other day with Hockey player Dale Hawerchuk.

I think the only unethical thing could be to list at an astronomical price (10-20x what they were going for previous) to try to cash in on the craze, even that is a bit debatable.

[bnorth]

The only unethical thing I can think of is canceling winning bids to relist the item at a much higher price. Selling ASAP is only good business.

[brianp-beme]

Nothing unethical, just be respectful if creating a new listing. To avoid this issue altogether, only collect and sell PreWW2 cards, as the players are all gone now.

Brian

[steve B]

Inflated prices because someone died is a very old thing in the hobby.

The first time I saw it was with Jim Gilliam.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear it had happened much earlier.

[Yastrzemski Sports]

A few years ago I bought a collection of autographed cards. I listed a bunch online at fixed price. I can always tell when someone dies because all of the players cards sell immediately.

If you have mixed feelings about it, do what feels right.