I love when Rick offers like 50% of the experts estimate and then tells them if they go to auction they'll pay a 20% fee (usually it's actually less than that). Can people not do basic basic math? Lose 20% or let Rick rip you off for 50%.
shareHe's also lying. Auctions don't charge the sellers a percentage they charge the buyers
shareHe's not really lying. Yes, the buyer pays a fee called a premium. If an auction house charges 20% and the buyer wins an auction for $1,000 then they owe $1,200. Who get what percentage of that depends on...
But the seller also (usually) pays a commission to the auction house, somewhere between 0-25% depending on how rare the item is because it is the merchandise that drives the auction. The seller is in the driver's seat. Someone who has a super rare item can negotiate a smaller commission than someone who is selling a less rare item.
Other seller’s fees might include charges for photography of your item, insurance, transportation, or for special services such as restoration, cleaning, or repair of an object prior to sale.
So the auction house obviously wants everything to sell for as much as possible since they make money from both parties involved.
The auctions I'm familiar with, only the seller is charged. However, the buyer takes that into consideration when placing the bid.
shareMost auctions have both seller commissions and buyer's fees
shareI once won an MP3 player around 1999 had tried to pawn it to see because (don't laugh) I had no idea what an MP3 player was. Web sites were listing it at $750-900, the guy offered me $125. I would have, but my boss gave me $200 because it was cool looking.
shareOr maybe it's just another fake reality show.
What I can't figure is how the boys on Mountain Monsters don't just shoot them bigfoots when they first see em.
They need quick money because they are addicted to gambling and so need the money asap. most of the people selling those items are addicts. It is not an accident one of the most succesful pawn stores is in Vegas.
shareThat Vegas point is funny. That's true, a lot of gamblers there. I don't see the big discussion here though, I think OP got an answer. People aren't "stupid"; when you sell to a pawn shop, you are taking out time & guesswork, and you have the convenience of an instant buyer for your junk.
This is all economics 101 as well; time is money. The guy with selling the poster made a great example here. OK, so poster is worth $1000~, and he sold it for $300. First off all, like he said, it can take YEARS to move something like that. Second, your time is worth everything you did to sell that poster. Let's say it took you a solid two hours to take photos of it, create an ebay listing page, and dink around with selling it. Maybe your hourly rate for your job is $50/hour. That means you lost $100, spending two hours of your time simply creating an ebay listing and other things.
Now, more economics. Someone buys the poster for $900~ (on ebay or in the pawn game, you don't always get asking price as you've learned from pawn stars). Automatically, ebay takes 10% as a seller fee (a lot of people don't realize this, I do because I've sold a lot on there and it sucks). You then lose $90 bucks to ebay right there. Now, maybe the buyer paid the shipping, but your packaging and insurance to safely deliver it, another $10~ bucks there. Plus your gas, maybe you drove 5~ miles round trip to post office/UPS and it took 30 minutes of your time (that's $25 worth of your time).
At the end of the day when you look at raw and basic economics of it, he really would have only made $650~ selling the poster, if that. So taking it to a pawnshop for being quick and convenient, it's not always a terrible thing. Especially if you have something that's going to be very hard to sell. A pawn shop, that's their business; they are patient, and have the time/energy/resources to sell things for that top of the line price, and probably have special accounts with FedEx/eBay and things to get discounted rates. They can get top dollar, it's not always beneficial of the seller to try and do that.