Several months ago, auctioneers routinely sold the assets of bankrupt e-commerce companies for pennies or nickels on the dollar. Top-of-the-line servers with sticker prices of US$100,000 or more could be had for less than US$15,000. Ergonomic chairs, football tables, laptop computers and other dot-com detritus sold for one-tenth or one-twentieth of their original purchase price.
But as publicity surrounding the dot-com demise spreads, crowds are flocking to asset-liquidation sales--and bids are going up. For the past several weeks, auction companies have been taking up the equivalent of several pages of ads in the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. Played as both a tragedy and a comeuppance, the phenomenon has been fodder for journalists at ABC News, National Public Radio, The Wall Street Journal and scores of other media outlets.
But the story is changing--quickly. A liquidation event sponsored by Charyn Auctions on Tuesday in San Francisco's warehouse district proved that bargains are becoming scarce as dot-com auctions go mainstream.
There were few true steals among the remains of defunct dot-coms Greenlight.com, eFrontier, BigWords and Creditland. The warehouse was chock-full of corporate mementos--beanbag chairs, maple conference desks, scores of office chairs, hundreds of phones, racks full of computers and computer equipment, odd lots of software, a Ping-Pong table with 10 paddles and a mysterious set of brightly coloured, square mattresses that seemed plucked from a nursery school.
A used Panasonic microwave oven went for US$40--not bad, but US$5 more than the going price at San Francisco's all-purpose community site Craigslist. A severely used Sanitaire vacuum went for US$50--about the same price as the current top bid for a similar sucker at eBay. A General Electric refrigerator went for US$125--probably more than it would at a garden-variety garage sale.
A Hewlett-Packard 5000N laser-jet printer fetched US$600. "This is worse than the police auction," a woman hissed.
Laptops were among the most expensive items at the auction, relative to their sticker price. Only a handful went for less than US$700, and most were more than US$1,000. A Dell Latitude CPx laptop with a 650MHz Pentium III processor, 256K cache memory, 256MB main memory, a 12GB hard drive, 8MB of video memory, CD-ROM and floppy drives was US$1,300. Another Dell CPx laptop with a 650MHz Pentium III processor, 256K cache memory, 128MB of RAM, a 6GB hard drive, 8MB of video memory, CD-ROM and floppy drives was US$1,000.
The few good deals were in servers and other high-end equipment that mainstream shoppers wouldn't touch. A Sun Microsystems StorEdge A5100 disk storage array with 14 36GB Fibre Channel 10,000RPM drives went for US$4,500. A Sun Ultra 60 workstation with two 360MHz UltraSparc CPUs, 4MB cache memory, 1GB main memory, a 9GB, 7,200-rpm drive, CD-ROM and a Creator graphics card went for US$1,750.
Though the latter may have cost US$10,000 new, it's important to remember that all auction merchandise is sold "as is." Goods are certified by independent contractors, but the second owner usually has no ongoing manufacturers' warranty.
