[Mauser720]

David -

Thank you for sharing your auction experience.

I have been having pretty much the same experience with various on-line "live" auctions and it is somewhat of a mystery to me. You would think that if the economy is so bad that you would expect to see items being sold for more reasonable prices. But that just is not the case.

I have even seen a few of my own maximum bids that I thought were outrageously high still get beaten.

One possible explanation for what is going on is that there are still lots of uninformed bidders out there who simply do not realize that they are paying far more for something than it is actually worth. If someone has more money than knowledge, then they can run the price up beyond what it is actually worth. I think that is still happening.

And I also think that in the bidding action some bidders are forgetting that they have to add the buyer's premiums, fees, ets., to their bids. And as you point out, this can really amount to a lot of money too. A $1,200 item can end up costing $1,405.00 by the time you add all the "extras" to the winning bid. (This was my recent experience although I knew this and was well aware this was going to happen.)

Anyway, that's my "two cents" worth regarding current auctions in general. The current auction climate is certainly not what one would expect to encounter.