Sure, but if you point that information out before the sale transaction, he might decline to sell it to you after all - that’s why I recommend the buying-first-then-selling-and-comping-the-seller-afterwards approach. And it’s possible that you, the buyer, might be mistaken, too - you might think the object is highly valuable, but then after buying it find out that it wasn’t worth much after all and end up having overpaid the seller - another reason not to tip off the seller in advance.
My dry cleaner remarked that a man brought in some stuff to be cleaned and forgot he had $800 in his pants pocket. That level of “oops” happens. If my wife somehow scraped up the money to get a Picasso, I’d know about it. If she died, I’d be pretty careful not to sell it off for pennies.
Not everyone is careful. Losing $800 may crush some, financially. Then there’s Paris Hilton. The mother of all returns on investment?
https://people.com/celebrity/paris-hilton-sues-exposed-site/
The lawsuit alleges that defendants Nabil and Nabila Haniss of Culver City, Calif., paid $2,775 for Hilton’s items and then sold them for $10 million to entrepreneur Bardia Persa, creator of Parisexposed.com.
Reads the text on the Web site: “Believe it or not, this supermodel, from one of the wealthiest families in the world, failed to pay her $208 bill. … As you probably guessed by now, the storage unit was auctioned off … the heiress lost all rights to her goods.”
Anybody who has watched those programs know that sometimes bidders end up losing money…the people chose to stop paying for storage because the stuff wasn’t valuable enough to justify the rent.
You’re thinking of provenance. And yes, normally that’s wanted for works of art. There was a recent case of an art forger in New York and one of the claims that the dealer (a respected one that was over 150 years old) should have been aware of the forgeries was that there was no provenance for the pieces or the provenance was “wacky”. Now, these were paintings less than a hundred years old, so it doesn’t seem likely that they could disappear for a long time. The Ming bowl I mentioned upthread was over 400 years old, so it’s possible that a provenance may not be possible, which is why expert authentication is so important.
If the difference in price/value was relatively small, like 10x, I wouldn’t feel much compuncture to share; say a baseball card selling for $10 but I know it’s worth ~ $100. But if it was life-changing money I would definitely share the proceeds.
One aspect of the ethical question is whether the seller would experience any regret or negative consequences from the sale. Assuming the seller never finds out about the resale at a high price, would they ever suffer themselves by selling it so cheap?
For example, you go to a garage sale and find a $20 box of what the sellers think are “worthless toys” but you know they are worth $X,XXX. If the box of toys was something they bought at a garage sale for their grandkids to play with when they came over, then likely no one will care if they are sold. But if the box contains the valuable toy collection their son had when he moved away for college, then likely the parents will suffer in some degree when their child finds out and is mad his valuable stuff was sold.
So with regards to that aspect, it would be beneficial to ask the background of the item to see if there’s potential for future regret. If it’s clear the sellers will never find out the difference in value, then there’s less of an ethical question.
Another aspect is how wealthy the sellers are. Rich people often just want stuff out of the house and don’t really care how much they get for it. I’ve gotten tons of great deals on Craigslist on cars, tools, furniture, etc. because it’s clear the seller just wants the item removed quick and easy and doesn’t really care about getting top dollar.
Does that change things? The garage sale in the OP is a commercial transaction, and the buyer agreed to the seller’s fee.
I think so. Why wouldn’t it be? What’s the ethical principle that makes this a bad thing to do?
Is there an ethical duty to share the wealth of something with former owners? I don’t think there is. The value of my house has gone up a lot since I bought it. Should I go track down the former owners and give them some of the money?
I’ve read most of the posts in this thread, and I don’t see an ethical problem with keeping all the profit from such a transaction, if the amount was asked and agreed to by the seller.
My touchstone for an ethical decision is the question: would I want to live in a world where everyone behaved that way? Or put slightly differently: could society function if everyone behaved that way? So I think about a world where people are greedy but honest, and I think I could live in such a world, and such a society would probably function just fine.
Further: Windfalls are windfalls, and when in the chain of ownership someone realizes they have a windfall is down to knowledge and chance. The seller, after all, acquired the object somehow without realizing its value, and perhaps so did the previous owner, and so on back who knows how long. If my grandmother left me a ceramic bowl without revealing its value, which I kept for only sentimental reasons, and which my heirs sell off in a garage sale, I don’t think my heirs or I have any complaint against anyone except possibly my grandmother (who might not have acquired it honestly herself). Certainly not against the person who bought it knowing it was worth a fortune. My heirs did not earn that fortune and neither did I. The buyer saved the item from possible destruction, or more years of being unknown and ignored, through their knowledge and attention. They were not unethical to do so.
That’s not the same question, by the way, as what I as the buyer would do in such a situation. I don’t have any sort of expertise that is going to help me recognize a hidden treasure, so it would have to be dumb luck, and then more dumb luck for me to find out its real value. If it turned out to be a museum piece, I might well donate it to a museum and share the credit with the seller (with their permission). Otherwise I might keep it, or sell it and keep the proceeds, or share the proceeds with the seller, or return it to them (for what I paid) and let them deal with getting their profit from it. There are too many variables, and it could depend on how I feel that day. These are not, in my view, ethical decisions, for the reasons stated above.
A young relative and his friend have a side gig business where they visit the Goodwill “bins” looking for stuff to Ebay. For those not familiar with “the bins,” after the Goodwill stores pick over donations anything they can’t see enough value in to send to a store they just pile up and send to one location where everything is put into bigass bins that people go through and pay a price per pound on whatever items they winnow out. They’ve paid less than a buck for jackets that went for $300 on Ebay, pennies for toys that sold for 10-100 bucks depending and basically just hustled their way into some very decent coin. All because they’re willing to go to the bins, go through some admittedly pretty manky stuff looking for cool shit then cleaning as needed, posting on Ebay and shipping. There’s money to be made being the middleman who’s willing to put in the time and effort, which most people aren’t willing to do–and of course this all rests on a sizable percentage of people who just want that stuff GONE.
I mean, I know people who work for Goodwill who’ve pocketed valuable jewelry found in pockets and the like–working at a store is kind of a license to steal because nobody cares. The stuff was free to begin with and nobody’s really paying attention so employees constantly take stuff from the stores. On the one hand, that’s not really ethical but on the other hand all they’re actually stealing is a bit of employee time to process the items and stick a price tag on them so it could be argued there’s nothing all that wrong about it because the actual value of what they pocket is effectively zero–they’re only stealing the potential of someone buying it.
It makes me very happy to hear this about your enterprising young relative. I often drop stuff off at Goodwill that I might’ve been able to sell, but I just don’t want to deal with it. My greatest hope is that someone will find it and use it, and that it won’t end up in a landfill. That someone might find it and turn around and sell it to someone who wants it bad enough to pay $300 for it, well, that just warms my heart.
I don’t think there’s any ethical obligation to share your windfall with the seller. It’s a nice thing to do, though, and it would be nice if people did more than they were ethically obligated to do. But hey, I’d settle for a world in which people merely grudgingly fulfilled their minimum legal obligations, let alone ethical obligations, let alone going the extra kindness mile.
It just seems you (general “you”) are profiting off of the ignorance of others.
Akin to going to some remote part of Australia (or wherever) and giving trinkets to the natives in return for precious jewels.
So many of the arguments here that it is tough luck for the seller would seem to apply here.
Except the situation is reversed here - no one is walking into anyone’s home and saying „Give me your priceless Ming cereal bowl for 4$!“ - it’s being offered for sale. Yes, the seller might not know exactly what they’re dealing with, but they’re the ones who initiated the transaction in the first place: „Please buy this junk I don’t want anymore!“
Not really comparable to a colonialist taking valuable jewels from indigenous people.
Why not?
It is someone who realizes that the item on offer has huge value when the person selling it doesn’t.
Isn’t this the sort of thing behind things like fair trade coffee? Some poor peasant in South America has no idea they could sell their product for (making numbers up) $5/pound in New York so sells it for $0.05/pound?
Or maybe all the diamonds they collected in their area because they are common they sell for a pittance because it has no value to them.
No need for a gun to their head.
Now you‘re kinda moving goalposts - indigenous people are not really the same as coffee farmers in Colombia. There the problem isn’t only one of knowledge, but more of logistics - how is that farmer going to get the coffee to New York to sell it for $5? (I am strongly in favor of fair-trade coffee, but I believe this might take the discussion a bit far off-track.)
Is any transaction with a mismatch of information inherently immoral? I concede there is a difference of magnitude when you’re talking about a difference that’s in the order of millions, but how about this: I’m sure your employer doesn’t know everything you do, and gives you money to use that knowledge for him. Like I said, there’s a difference in scale, for sure.
Yes, but it was to illustrate a point.
If you are travelling and see an item the locals are selling for dirt cheap which you know you can flip when you get back home for a big profit is that ethical?
You address that but don’t really answer that question.
If they’re the ones freely offering the item up for sale? Sure. It might be nice to say: „You know, you could sell that for 10x the price in the city.“, but they’re the ones who wanted to get rid of whatever. Again, scale does come into play, so paying $10 for a $100 item is okay, paying $0.25 for a $1,000,000 item maybe not so much.
I drifted too far off course here and the board won’t let me delete the post so you all get this.
Sorry.
My feeling is, “no.” If the seller doesn’t know what he or she has, then you’ve got a bargain.
I collect rare books. More than one has come from used bookshops. Others have come from garage sales. I once got a first edition hardback of Arthur Hailey’s Hotel for about $1 from a garage sale. With the dust jacket, as it has, it’s worth at least a thousand. I also found a first edition of Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger for $70 from a used bookseller. I’ve been offered $4000 for it.
My rare books are not investments. They are simply things I like to collect. I do deal with a rare bookseller for things that are on my wishlist, but that doesn’t stop me prowling through used bookstores and garage sales, looking for the diamond in the rough. I feel no compunction to share with the past owner, because I’m not out to resell them–I just collect them.
And then there’s my first edition of Stephen King’s The Stand–the real first edition, hardback, edited; before King made the publisher restore his wishes. Bought for maybe $10 at a used bookstore. Today? Maybe in the hundreds or thousands, but I’m not going to sell. Like I said, I just collect.
It’s a great hobby, and if somebody doesn’t know what they have–well, tough.
I very much find this an appealing argument. While I might personally choose to cut the seller in on the windfall, society is just fine if we simply take the price as given.
There were also a few times on Pawn Stars where the seller actually had something that was worth more than they realized, and Rick offered to pay more than what the person was asking. The reasoning being that it would be bad for the store’s reputation if they were to later discover the true value of their item and went around telling people how he ripped them off.
Of course an individual buying something at a garage sale is different from someone running a business, and we don’t necessarily have to worry about our reputations like a business owner does…
Consider this: On a nice Saturday morning, I go out in a likely neighborhood, and cruise around looking for signs that say “Garage sale this way ->”. I stop at 8 or 10, buy a few things at some of them, find that some others don’t have anything of interest to me, and for others, decide that they’re too far out of my way. After I get home, I take a look at my new purchases, maybe look a few of them up online, and then discover that one of them is worth a fortune.
Even if I’d like to pass some of that windfall on to the previous owner, how? I don’t remember where I got each item. I’m not keeping records. There’s nothing, realistically, I can do. And I wouldn’t feel in the least bit guilty about that.