“One day I’m going to buy a whole pile of junk PCs from a company that’s gone bust and sell them at an auction like this,” said Mark, an old business partner, as I lost a bet that a group of almost valueless laptops wouldn’t be sold for more than $10 each.
The media release behind yesterday’s article on protecting USB data found on attracted criticism about Cityrail’s attitude towards privacy – which is fair enough as good manners, if not privacy laws, dictate you’d wipe someone else’s data before giving a drive away.
More notable in the IT News article is the comment that Paul Ducklin, chief technology officer at Sophos, “was shocked when the auction price was nearly twice the average retail value of the USBs.”
Paying over the odds for second hand technology is a trap many fall for, the average consumer doesn’t comprehend just how much technology depreciates or the risks, such as malware or defective hardware, that could be found when you finally take that computer bought at auction home.
The main attraction of auctions is that people believe they are getting a deal, the idea things were dirt cheap on eBay drove the service’s growth for much of its first ten years.
Of course that hasn’t been the case for some time and many people paid a lot of money for junk they didn’t need even when things were “cheap”.
The only way to really get a deal at auction is to know the retail price, then factor in realistic depreciation and the risk of buying a dud.
My rule of thumb at those IT auctions I used to attend with Mark was that when the bids passed more than a third of the retail price, people were overpaying. I rarely bought anything except office chairs and the odd filing cabinet.
I haven’t heard from Mark for a while, I suspect his business plan didn’t work out when he overpaid for some surplus equipment from a liquidator.