Brokers' prices
And none of these prices includes the 12 percent add-on fee that the auction company charges, nor the local sales tax of 8.25 percent. That means all top bidders must actually pay more than 20 percent above the final price on the auction floor.
"The prices are high," admitted David Charyn, who runs the auction company with his auctioneer father, Ronald Charyn. "But that just means we've done our job well. It all depends on where you advertise, your reputation for reliability, the skill of the auctioneer and the buyers...We have VIP brokers who get special invitations. They pick up the prices and take out the slack."
The increasing number of these brokers has also pushed up prices at California dot-com auctions, Charyn said. The VIPs may come from as far away as Florida or elsewhere on the East Coast to find bargains on servers, routers and switches that are available only in enormous quantities in technology hubs such as the San Francisco Bay Area.
But no one pushes up prices like the hordes of first-time auction attendants, and veterans are already lamenting the good old days of three months ago--when they had the auction floor to themselves.
One Bay Area broker bemoaned "folks who don't do their homework" and take bids too high simply because they don't know the retail or wholesale cost of an item. The broker also blamed the media.
"You can't turn around without bumping into a reporter these days," he said, not wishing to have his name associated with yet another auction article. "It's getting ridiculous."
The publicity and crowds have dramatically altered the mood of many liquidation sales.
Once the haunt of hard-core resellers in the computer hardware and office furniture niches, the auctions are now dens of regular folk: morbid onlookers fascinated by the dot-com meltdown, small-business owners, random passersby, even stray joggers. A growing cadre of attendants are avid bargain hunters unfamiliar with auction etiquette: shoppers who normally forage for deals on sofas and pool tables at garage sales, police and charity auctions, and estate sales.
At the Charyn event, hundreds of people from all walks of life--some dressed in slacks and Hermes ties, others dressed in shorts and T-shirts from dead dot-coms--flooded the event after reading about it online and in the Chronicle. It was held in a relatively desolate, graffiti-scarred area just down the street from All Auto Dismantlers and M&M Auto Wreckers.
The stuffy warehouse was so packed that the auctioneer had to stop the bidding at least twice to announce that people had parked their cars in front of nearby companies' garage doors and loading docks.
Later, he turned to receive an odd-sounding bid from someone behind him; it turned out to be a baby who squealed with delight while playing near some beanbag chairs that were once the hip additions to a dot-com office. His young parents smiled and shrugged, and the bidding proceeded.
