Pam I think I get what he is saying, don't bid if you don't want the plant, and most of us will not, but... I bid, you bid, they bid...I bid, they bid, you bid...You bid they bid I bid...ect. and so it goes. At least that is how all auctions I have been to work! If you bump it up, don't you have to pay if you win? I don't bid on many plants on the LA, very few. But to me bidding your highest price first sort of takes away the meaning of an auction and all the fun. Of course if I don't really want the plant, or the seeds, I am not going to bid in the first place. I was in the auto salvage business for years and my brother went to the sales and bid on the cars in order for us to have parts to sell. There were all kinds of games played, all sorts of little side deals made, people laid off bidding for certain friends on specific cars on request. People asked others to bid for them if they thought a revenge bid might be placed against them, but if you bumped a bid you had better be ready to pay and often when a rude bidder was bidding , others would bid them up and drop it on him, but the high bidder had to pay so you had to hope you could read the bids and know when to get out, that did not always work. So it paid to be sociable, it paid to work with others, and it paid to use strategy. It was called an auction because that is exactly what it was.
Sometimes I see people up their own bid...a mistake I can understand, but sometimes I see it more than once. That strategy I don't understand either.
How many of us know what our best bid is before the bidding starts? I saw recently where people felt better when the received a bonus or gift plant when they saw that other people had purchased the same plant. That made the plant seem more valuable. At all auctions it seems that just the fact that others are willing to bid higher seems to make the plant worth more! I think that is one of the reasons they have auctions! I think the very fact that if you are the high bidder on a plant that is called a "Win" it makes people feel they have "won" something, that they have actually bought! But also you have won the bidding process, just like winning a race, it evolves competition. I think for a lot of people that process is a lot of fun.
