What do you do when you find something selling for too cheap and you still don't want it?
jonathanb
Posts: 3,753 ✭✭✭✭✭
This situation has happened to me twice recently. I saw something listed at a price that was way too cheap, and I still didn't want to buy it because I simply didn't like the item. I knew I could easily flip the item for 5x what I would pay, simply because that was the going rate. And I still didn't like the item.
If you want something specific, consider a hideously ugly heavily corroded chain cent offered for $150, when they simply don't sell for less than $750 in any condition.
I know what I did in one case recently, and I'm probably going to do something different in a second case.
What would you do?
If you want something specific, consider a hideously ugly heavily corroded chain cent offered for $150, when they simply don't sell for less than $750 in any condition.
I know what I did in one case recently, and I'm probably going to do something different in a second case.
What would you do?
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This happened to me once... sort of.
It wasn't that the item in question was repugnant to me, it just represented a gamble that was a tiny bit too risky for me at the time.
There was this cigar box full of world coins on eBay, see...
With the typical blurry, too-distant photo, meaning you could just barely make out what some of the coins were, but not many of them, so the rest of the box was a mystery, as were the dates and details of even the more visible coins.
HOWEVER, placed front and center on the top of the pile (perhaps strategically so) was what appeared to be a British gold half-sovereign of George the Fifth. You could make out the portrait and judge the size of the coin and it was clearly bright gold in color.
The starting bid on the lot was something like 35 bucks. Not a lot of money, but just enough that I didn't really feel like gambling on it. I was about to leave for a vacation, anyway, or I might have felt a little bolder. I pointed the auction out to a dealer friend I was assisting at the time.
He bid, and won the lot for something like 45 dollars.
The outcome?
It turns out the "half-sovereign" was indeed fake, as I had worried. It was just a gold-plated jewelry charm.
BUT... there was a veritable type set of Puerto Rican coins in there (and if you're a Darksider, you know that all Puerto Rican coinage is scarce to rare). This lot had all the minors and lacked only the big peso. And it had duplicates of some types. Jim sent the PR coins off to ANACS, where they all slabbed in the EF-AU range. He made something like $1,700-2,000 on the Puerto Rican portion of the lot alone. And there was STILL another $400-500 worth of stuff in that cigar box!
So the strategically-placed "gold bling" was phony, but the rest, unseen and unsuspected in the poor photo, was good stuff indeed.
Had I been a gambler, I could have won that toss of the dice. At least I gave a good tip to somebody else, who remembered the favor.
I start a thread saying : "Coin Posse Needed".
``https://ebay.us/m/KxolR5
<< <i>quick flip to buy something i like...simple >>
Yup that's what I'd do. Buy a morgan or 2.