I was going to say it’s unethical but on looking at the responses I realised that there have been a few times the I have been to the races, a bookmaker has put up a plainly wrong price for a horse and, rather than tell him, I have backed the horse. On one occassion I got 100/1 about a horse that started 8/1.
The OP also reminded me of a favorite fictional story on this theme from Roald Dahl. Here it is on YouTube: Tales of the Unexpected Series 3 Episode 6 Parsons Pleasure.
Anyone dumb enough to sell a Honus Wagner T206 for $20 deserves to get ripped off.
Others have alluded to this but whenever I heard that famous story about the guy who bought a picture frame that had a Declaration of Independence inside I really have wondered if anyone ever tracked down the seller and recorded what they thought.
How do you figure? What if they’re immigrants? What if they are just very ignorant about baseball cards and it would never occur to them that they might have value?
Going back to my hypothetical:
Would you just pay them $5, walk away, sleep soundly at night, and, when recounting the story to others, say that they “deserve” to get ripped off?
Economics 101: an item is worth what the seller and the buyer decide it is, nothing more and nothing less. I used to go around to thrift stores 20 and 25 years ao and paw thru their flat wear looking for silver. Most people didn’t know the difference between silver and silver plae. I made maybe $1000 over several years doing that, Probably never made $5.00 an hour at it though.
Nother story, I was driving down the road and saw a 1954 Hudson for sale. 3 Jamaican brothers had returned to Florida when daddy died. they were asking $400 for it. Problem was they had several old cars and only one 6 volt battery. I paid them the $400 in cash, we started the old beast and I drove toward home batteryless wondering where I could possibly buy a 6 volt battery. I remembered an old fart my brother had worked for some. I pulled in at his shop and asked him where I could buy a 6 volt battery for the car I had just bought. “How much did you pay?” he asked me “$1000.” I said off the top of my head. “You wanna make $200 real fast?” He asked. I did and sold it to him immediately. He resold it the same day for $3000 I learned later. Did I screw the Jamaicans? No I don’t believe so. did the old guy screw me? No I don’t believe so. We were all happy with the transaction at the time it happened.
Something like this sorta happened to me. At a garage sale, someone was selling a jar of change grandpa had been collecting since about 1906. It was full of all sorts of old coins. They wanted $1 for the pennies and nickels, $2 for the dimes, $5 for the quarters, $10 for half-dollars, and $20 for dollar coins, which about reflected the silver content in them. I glanced through them, and most were pretty ordinary, lots of buffalo nickels not worth more than 5 cents, but there were a couple of rare dates that individually were worth anywhere from $12-25. I looked through a couple of handfuls, and figured that I’d found at least $75 worth of coins. I didn’t know what was left it that jar. The rest might all be duds. I told them there were a few valuable coins in the jar, and they could get more than what they were asking if they took it to a coin dealer. They said they just wanted to get rid of it, and didn’t know where to go to find a coin dealer.
So, I offered them $200 for the whole jar. I went home, and combed through it. It took me a couple of hours, especially since I was using books and dial-up internet, but I looked them all up, and I had well more than $200 in rare dates. I kept some, and sold some to a dealer (you don’t get as much from a dealer as you do selling them privately). I sold some more privately over the years. Some I still have. I had a lot of fun spending the Buffalo nickels, which really were not worth more than 5 cents, and there was a good $3 worth of them. Spent some wheat pennies too.
For the heck of it, I counted up what the people would have made if they’d sold all the coins for what they were asking, and they wouldn’t have gotten $200. They would have gotten more than $100, though, but only if they’d sold the whole jar for exactly what they were asking.
We both came out ahead, I think, because they just wanted to get rid of the jar, and I had fun going through all the coins, making discoveries, and appraising the coins. I collected coins pretty seriously when I was a kid, so I had all the flush of an excited 12-year-old who just found treasure.
I could have gone through the whole jar, and paid what they were asking, and ended up spending less, but I felt good about the way I’d handled it.
If I’d found anything really, really valuable, like a coins worth $10,000, I probably would have gone back and given them a cut, but the most expensive coin was more in the are of $60.
Interestingly, except for a couple of quarters, most of the rare and valuable coins were nickles. IIRC, there were only a couple of silver dollars, and they weren’t worth much more than their silver content.
As someone who has had a lot of yard sales, I don’t think it’s unethical or dishonest.
I’ve also sold a fair number of things on craigslist and ebay and through other second hand outlets. I’ve come to the conclusion that mostly it is more work than it is worth to me.
Actually even yard sales are generally more work than they are worth to me and I just give stuff away for free to thrift stores.
Part of the decision I make when having a yard sale is that I want this stuff gone more than I want to do a bunch of research to find out if any of it is valuable and go to the trouble of getting it to the people to whom it is valuable.
No worse than the scam some people try to pull when they go to a yard sale and see furniture and try to get you to come down with a sob story of how they are buying for someone who just lost their home.
I might just do it if I had some proof.
OTOH, what if they had say $100 tag on that Homus Wagner card and they darn well knew it was a forgery?
That would be fraudulent and unethical… but the hypothetical existence of someone trying to defraud people at yard sales doesn’t somehow imply some high level ethical balancing which makes it OK to take advantage of other people at other yard sales. The two hypotheticals are independent events, unless it’s the same yard sale.
There’s no “rip off”. It’s the definition of “Fair Market Value”.
I was just using the language in the post I was responding to, post #41.
My mother (now deceased) was part of the sub-culture that made estate sales their lives. She was very well trained in art and researched lots. She bought lots of stuff thinking it might be an original whatever and it wasn’t and some that was. In the real world you very rarely “know” what something is worth, you are betting on your knowledge. She was also a hoarder and going through her house after her death was a major undertaking, researching literally many many thousands of objects to determine the crap from the items of value.
That said one of her friends had jewelry and watches as his expertise and would never buy something knowing it was actually worth much much more than it was priced at … OTOH he would ask if they had any costume jewelry or old watches and offer an amount for the whole lot without evaluating it. He knew that usually there would be enough that had value as collectables to cover his cost and that every so often something of major value would be in there as well … once a collectable watch that sold for over 10K. He did not go back and give them a bigger cut even though he would not have felt right buying it for the small amount if had known what he was buying ahead of time.
I suspect any reasonable definition of fair market value involves more than two people. Much less when one person has no idea of an items value as actually determined by the market.
I don’t see how paying someone what they are asking for an item, is taking advantage of them…
of course opinions on this vary which is why the question was asked to start with
So, you’d pay $5 for something you could resell for $50,000, knowing that the people selling it are in dire financial straits, and never think twice or feel any twinge of guilt?
I don’t recall ever knowing the financial status of the people running any yard sale I’ve ever been to.
The situation you are positing is an extreme example and is highly unlikely to occur in real life. Nonetheless, information is valuable and is a normal part of negotiating, so I would say yes, it is acceptable to buy a good at the price it is offered. Any obligation I may have to the seller as a matter of basic decency is independent of the transaction we were involved in.
Right, as I said when I first posted that hypothetical back 30 posts ago, it’s an extreme situation. Which is what I think makes it interesting…
If there’s an antique dealer who should know better and generally has the knowledge of what’s what, and he lets something slip buy and I buy something for $50 that’s worth $250, I will feel zero guilt. But he’s a professional who (a) has no excuse for not knowing better, and (b) presumably isn’t in dire financial straits. But change some of the characteristics of the hypothetical, and vastly increase the disparity in value, and it starts to feel dirty and immoral.
Don’t fight the hypothetical. Maybe they’re your neighbor. Maybe you overhear someone discussing it. Maybe you’re a teacher and you know that their kids have been borderline-undernourished for months.
I’m not sure why assuming that the next person could do worse than yourself is a good reason to absolve yourself.
Apparently, you don’t think that cheating the struggling family out of $ 40 000 is unethical. So let’s assume instead that they left their items unatended. You steal them and leave money for 1/5 of their value. Does the assumption that the nex passer by might have stolen the items and left nothing make you less guilty?
What other people might have done is irrelevant, especially since, for all you know, the next potential buyer might have, at the contrary, pointed at the real value of the magic cards.