Lights! Camera! Auction!
In the market for a chemistry-lab cabinet? An antique washstand? A rhinestone tiara? Somewhere in Texas, the bidding is about to begin.
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The Feds: I never would have gone to the Willie Nelson IRS auction at his Pedernales recording studio six years ago if I hadn’t been covering it for a paper I worked for. It was bleak and depressing; real vultures circled overhead in the gray skies that day. The IRS agents were brusque and the crowd was hostile, refusing to bid on anything. The crowd wasn’t so compassionate at the IRS auction I attended this summer at the Gaston and Sheehan auction house at 1420 FM 685 in Pflugerville. Living and breathing incarnations of the characters from King of the Hill vied for office furniture, tools, a mangy stuffed bear and leopard, and truckloads of model kits for ships, jeeps, and space shuttles. Prices were high, but there’s something to be said for the quality of items unwillingly forfeited, especially when compared with the condition of some equipment at surplus sales. The Dell computers ($400), Epson printers ($230), and Emerson microwave ($55) auctioned here might actually work. The “mahogany” workstations ($700) and credenzas ($425) fetched near-retail prices.
In August, a week before an auction of cars and boats seized from an Austin-area drug dealer, officers from every branch of law enforcement involved in the seizure—the IRS, Customs, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the local police—held a press conference, carefully explaining to half a dozen reporters how the money from the sale of these assets would go back into federal and local crime-fighting efforts. At the actual sale, which took place in the ballroom of the Austin Marriott Hotel, all you needed to bid on a piece of drug-smuggling history was a photo I.D. and a cashier’s check for $10,000. Two hundred bidders scrounged up the money and, along with several hundred onlookers, sat gaping as collectors rapidly bid up a 1988 Ferrari Testarossa to $75,000, a 1967 Corvette Roadster to $59,000, and a 1988 Porsche 930 to $38,000. Bargain hunters left the ballroom grumbling, but the Feds were thrilled.
The Military: Kafka would feel right at home at the DRMO at East Kelly Air Force Base (500 Tayman Street, Building 3000) in San Antonio. The warehouse, a temple to bureaucratic consumption, is so huge the workers ride three-wheeled bikes from one end to the other, cataloguing hundreds of computers, tools, engines, machine parts, televisions, books, shoes, desks, and chairs. Even this quarter-mile-long storeroom can’t contain all the bid lots, some of which are housed in a dozen outbuildings nearby. The bidding process is tedious. Everyone crowds into a room isolated from the sale items. Bidders cram themselves into school desks and bury their noses in their catalogs, which list three-hundred-plus lots. Talk too much or too loudly and you’ll be scolded. Behave yourself and you can take home 44 ball bearings ($175), a bunch of jet engine components ($750), obsolete diving equipment ($40), or 450 pounds of telephones ($100). Look for these sales to be held about twice a month.
The General Services Commission: At a GSC auction in Austin, Neil Chavigny and I awaited the opening of the sealed bids for, among other things, an RC30, a huge camera used in aerial photogrammetry. Chavigny and his partner were bidding against a select handful of serious contenders. The lowest bid was $11, a figure that made those in the know snort with a mixture of humor and disgust. The winning bid was $298,000. Chavigny’s bid was $252,000. He was disappointed but immediately began scheming to acquire some other obscure and enormous instrument.
More typical GSC merchandise includes telephones and mobile radios, computers, used cars and trucks, and more office chairs than there are behinds in Texas to fill them. After the auction, I read through the lists and lists of items auctioned in the past few months and discovered that someone had bought a 1991 Ford Aerostar minivan for $2,662 and another lucky devil had scored eleven pallets of computer floor tiles for $31.86. Or how about a 1982 Dodge pickup for $300 or a dozen Kodak slide-projector trays for $10?
The University of Texas at Austin: The UT auctions held three times a year at the J. J. Pickle Research Campus (10100 Burnet Road, Building 45, Austin) are my favorites (even though, as a Texas ex and a taxpayer, I have the nagging feeling I’ve paid for this stuff once before). The flotsam that collects here is so weird, it’s irresistible to my inner pack rat. People-watching is an added bonus: The crowd matches the eccentric merchandise. Wiry little guys scramble around on the heaps of scrap metal like mountaineers looking for gold. Pale, twitchy types with pocket protectors study dials and gauges and odd electronics for hours. Professorial men with gray goatees compete for 16mm moviolas ($65) and tripod attachments for giant cameras ($600). When I was there this summer, thirteen IBM color printers went for a buck apiece and a 1982 Chevette sold for $375. Two old desk fans fetched $35. And I lugged home an obsolete oscilloscope for only $5 (there’s at least $10 worth of knobs on the thing, and its screen still emits a ghostly green glow). The condition of merchandise here ranges from perfect to irreparable, so pre-purchase inspection is essential.
Local bureaucracies: At first glance, the auction of county, city, and school district surplus held this summer at the Kendall County Fairgrounds seemed too sparse to be eventful, but there were riches here for next to nothing: an Onan generator ($200), a powerful fan ($17.50), a right-angle grinder ($25), a school bus ($625), and a herd of bicycles ($5 to $60). I couldn’t resist dozens of tin ballot buckets in various sizes ($1 to $5) with the county precincts carefully hand-painted on the sides in thick black letters; I’ve since filled them with birdseed, cat litter, and plumbing parts. (I even met the man who had done the lettering back in the sixties.) If this auction were a swimming hole, it’d be the one I’d keep to myself.
Specialty Sales
ONCE YOU BECOME AN AUCTION AFICIONADO, you’ll sniff out the obscure specialty auctions—sales of African tribal art, say, or farm equipment or Hummel figurines—like a truffle-hunting pig. There are also country “estate” sales where boxes of mateless Tupperware lids are sold alongside well-worn La-Z-Boys, plastic flower arrangements, and—surprise!—a carved Empire chair or a huge collection of souvenir spoons. And restaurant-liquidation auctions are where you might snag custom light fixtures, a commercial range, or a carton half full of napkins or matchbooks.
The Internet is rife with auctions, but I’ve had little luck at any of them. When I was finally able to access the Web site of a celebrity auction, where movie stars’ donations are auctioned to raise money for charity, it had been canceled “due to technical problems.” I managed to hit the site of an online electronics and computer auction on my first try but got no response as I clicked around trying to find out how to bid; so I signed up for its online mailing list. Its e-mailed announcements come as regularly as allergies but still give no information on how to bid.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that I jinxed my success on the Net subconsciously. Computer auctions, like most interactions in cyberspace, are too far removed from the gritty experience. Ninety percent of the fun of an auction lies in being in the arena, snorting dust, eating candy bars for breakfast, watching greed and envy at work as, palms sweating and heart racing, you raise the bid, competing for the prize.
Learn the Lingo
You may not be able to understand what the silver-tongued auctioneer is chanting, but you’d better know what he means by:
Buyer’s Premium
A percentage added to the purchase price by the auction company. The amount, which can vary from nothing to 10 percent, should be posted on a sign by the cash register, announced before the sale starts, and printed on your bid card. If you buy something for $300, be prepared to fork over as much as $30 (plus sales tax) before you can take it home.
Lot
A unit of sale that can range in number from one to thousands. Typically, a lot cannot be broken up. Auctioneers will occasionally announce that a group of similar lots will be “sold for choice.” Say there are a hundred Madame Alexander dolls, each listed as a separate lot. All of the dolls are auctioned at once, the highest bid determining the price per doll. The winning bidder can choose as many dolls as he wants. Any dolls that remain are offered to the second-highest bidder at the hammer price, and so on. What’s left usually goes back on the block.
Reserve
How low can you go? No lower than the reserve, the minimum price an item can sell for, usually set by the auction house or seller. Often there is no reserve, but if there is, sometimes it is disclosed before bidding begins, and sometimes it’s the auctioneer’s secret.
X Times the Money
Those six lyre-back chairs are going for only $60? Maybe not. If the auctioneer started the bidding by saying, “We’re selling these six times the money,” the buyer will be shelling out $360 to claim half a dozen chairs.
Mind Your Own Bidness
• When you know what you want and have inspected it thoroughly (Will it fit? Is it damaged?), strengthen your resolve not to get carried away by making a written note of your limit before the bidding begins and passion swells your head but not your pocketbook.
• The auctioneer might open the bidding for, say, an antique armoire by asking, “Do I hear $100?” If you want to bid that amount, raise your bid card high enough to catch the attention of the auctioneer or one of his ring men, who help him spot bidders in a crowded room.
• When the auctioneer sees you, he’ll say something like, “I’ve got $100. Do I hear $200?” someone else raises his card and is in the bidding. “I’ve got $200; do I hear $300?” asks the auctioneer, looking at you. If you now want to cut the bid jump in half, meet his gaze and, with your hand palm-down, make a quick slicing motion through the air, thereby locking in your counterbid at $250. But don’t do this too often; it can make the auctioneer cranky and destroys the rhythm.
• Don’t continually hold your bid number up like you’re the Statue of Liberty; it’ll mark you as an overeager novice with deep pockets. (On the other hand, San Antonio auctioneer Gene Vogt notes that such evident fervor can sometimes intimidate other bidders into giving up.) Once you’re in the bidding, you can often raise your bid with a nod of your head.
• Gently shake your head no—looking as bored as possible—when you’re out.
My Library
