The Heirloom House by Sherry Lefevre

Author:Sherry Lefevre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2015-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

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Because there is no longer a middleman to share in the profit. Adam Cohen writes at length about this in his fascinating book The Perfect Store (see pp. 106-110 in Cohen’s book). eBay put antique dealers in competition with their pickers—people who supplied them with “finds” from flea markets, garage sales, country auctions. These pickers are now selling directly on eBay.

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Because shopping at your local antique store creates a sense of scarcity (and thus higher value) but a global marketplace makes quantities visible and thus often less valuable. Here’s an example of this principle. My first encounter with tramp art came in a little antique shop in Frenchtown, New Jersey. I’d been rummaging around antique stores for thirty years but never seen anything like it. The price for the medium sized box was $398.00. Very cool but too expensive for me. Remembering that box, “tramp art” was one of the first antique “categories” I tried out when I began searching eBay. Tramp art was everywhere! But no, it wasn’t everywhere really. On closer look, the listings were mostly from Germany and the Netherlands, and from places those trampy German immigrants went, like Missouri, Wisconsin, Michigan, and East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Now that so much of tramp art was accessible to what had been remote markets, it was less expensive. The box in New Jersey was the only one I’d ever seen, and it was so unusual, I might have bought it if it had been a good day for my bank account. Now I’ve seen so many cool tramp art boxes on eBay, I’m demanding that they whistle and turn cartwheels.

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Because the auction format can almost guarantee sales, which means a seller can decide to live on smaller profit margins, but greater sales quantities. In other words, eBay can function like Walmart for sellers with sufficient quantity—sellers, for example, who specialize in estate liquidations. How many times have you walked into an antique store that was so quiet, you found yourself whispering for fear of disturbing the owner who has made it through half of War and Peace since the last customer? You pick up a china thimble and ask the price, knowing that either it will be $385 so he can pay the rent, or it will be $10 and he’ll be tempted to throw it at you if he’s sat there all afternoon and that’s all you’re going to purchase.

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