Gary

He's not saying that sellers are charging too much. Rather, his observation is that prices seem as high, or even higher, than retail stores. You are right, in that in an auction, the prices are set by the buyers, not the sellers.

The thing about Gunbroker is that, presumably, they have a very wide geographical spread in the participants. Some bidders live in very low-price parts of the country, and others live in very high-price places. The bidders from the higher-price places are used to paying more, not just for guns, but for everything else. To the bidder from the lower-price places, this can make prices higher than they are used to paying.

On balance, I think that GB is running a very good auction software package. I particularly like the 15-minute rule, which some other on-line auction companies do not have. Any bids made in the last 15 minutes automatically resets the clock to another full 15 minutes. This completely does away with the problem of using a software robot to make a last split-second bid. Its a very fair system.

Regards, Mike