I paid little attention to the owner as he whispered in the ear of the auctioneer. The tall portly man had been moving around the auction house all afternoon, so it wasn’t strange that he would bend the auctioneer’s ear. But what the auctioneer did in response was a surprise:
He asked the winning bidder of a Seagull Artist Portrait guitar to give it back.
The auction house had made a mistake, he said, and the starting price on the guitar should have been $650 instead of the $450 on the bid sheet.
“You said SOLD,” the buyer said incredulously, him as stunned as the rest of us in the audience. I could hear some murmurs from auction-goers near me. I heard the word “ethical” spoken by a man seated to my left at the end of my row of chairs. Just in front of me to the right, a woman remarked to her friend, “They made the mistake.” I didn’t hear the rest of her comments, but I’m sure she finished by saying that they should not have asked for it back.
Of all the years I’ve been going to auctions, I’ve never seen an auction house ask that an item be returned because the house made a mistake in the pricing. If that’s not legal, then it seems unethical. The owner should have just taken the $200 hit. There was no mention at the start of the bidding that there was a reserve on the guitar; there was only a minimum starting bid of $450. Besides, this man had been bidding like crazy on many items, and had probably already spent more than $200.
Should an auction house recall an item because it had made a mistake in the price? Is that legal or ethical?
I wondered if there were any auction rules that dealt with a situation like this. Under the Uniform Commercial Code, an item is sold when the auctioneer pounds the hammer. An auctioneer can withdraw an item before it is sold, but I couldn’t find any information on the web about whether he or she can withdraw an item after it is sold. The Pennsylvania Board of Auctioneer Examiners has a system for filing complaints but doesn’t list the categories. Most states require that auctioneers be licensed.
Auction houses normally spell out general rules publicly before the auction begins, but mentioning that they may ask for an item’s return is not usually part of it. If they did, no one would trust them. Bidders have to rely on the auction house to be both trustworthy and honest in its dealings. An auction house lives on its reputation, and it could easily be tarnished if this type of action was constant.
In this case, I believe the buyer had the right to say no and stick to it, unless he believed this was an honest mistake. Here, he seemed to have been bullied because the auctioneer kept asking him to give it back.
It had been years since I’d set foot in this building, because my first experience with the previous occupant was not good. The new auction house has assumed part of the old name and is in the same old spot, which perhaps make owners a little crazy. The original auction house engaged in subterfuge. The auctioneer would call out bids, looking from one side to another as if he were identifying bidders when he was actually making up the bids.
So, unless you had been to the auctions before, you didn’t realize that you were bidding against nobody. That happened to me on my first visit. I overpaid for an item for which I was the only bidder, although it seemed as if I was bidding against other people. A regular at the auction house later laid out the way things worked.
The previous owner died some years later, his wife closed down the place, and a new owner apparently bought it and its inventory. The place still looks the same, but maybe a little less cluttered.
The Seagull Artist Portrait guitar was sold as part of a special auction within the regular auction, and was open to online bidders. The guitar had custom bridge pins and came with a case, according to the bid sheet. Googling, I could find no Seagull Artist Portrait for sale; most retail sites listed it as discontinued (now, it can only be bought on a secondary market such as an auction). It was apparently part of the Artist Series by Seagull Guitars. On eBay, I found several others in the Artist Series selling for more than $1,000.
At the auction, when the auctioneer told the sole bidder that a mistake had been made, the man first had a slight resistance in his voice. But the auctioneer – with the owner at his side – insisted and the man finally obliged.
“Thank you,” the auctioneer said. “We’ll make it up to you.” The buyer had already been given the guitar, so he handed it back to them. I wondered if the owner would have asked the same of an online bidder, where I suspect he would have gotten some pushback.
This auction house was having a bad day; this wasn’t the only snafu. When a 1958 Life magazine with a cover parade photo of Willie Mays came up for bids, the assistants couldn’t find it. They finally figured out that they had inadvertently included it in a lot of 21 Life magazines that had been sold earlier.
An assistant found it lying on top of the stack of magazines on a chair in front of that buyer, and retrieved it. Now that was an honest $15 mistake.
Do you think the auction house should have asked that the guitar be returned? Was it ethical?
