[wptw]

Well, since Shadokat made this into a thread (and since she really didn't paraphrase my first email very accurately), I'll just paste my reply to her here. I'm the dissenting opinion she referred to.

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Hi Shadokat,

Thanks for your reply.

I understand the intention of your posts very clearly. I think what you’re doing is very noble. But I also think your posts are a knee-jerk reaction that has long term repercussions. It’s pretty simple supply and demand. The more demand you stir up, the more dealers will hike the prices. Higher prices mean several things – harder for the “average member” or indeed the national HQ to buy one, more incentive for people to steal badges, more incentive for collectors to sell duplicates from their collections on ebay rather than returning them to the national HQ, etc.

I have watched and recorded closing prices and winning bidders on every GLO pin auctioned on ebay since it started in 1997. Both the number of badges on ebay and the average sell prices are increasing at the alarming rate of about 25% per year! You think that’s happening in a vacuum? No, it’s a rapid growth in demand spurred on partly by this “sky is falling” panic response that you often see on greekchat and elsewhere. Do a greekchat search on “ebay” – there are like 25 threads in just the last week! More than half of them are about badges on ebay.

So with that in mind, who exactly are you “making aware”? Everyone on the planet knows that their GLO badges are frequently on ebay. There have been 415 fraternity and sorority pins sold on ebay in the last 30 days alone! If I’m a DPhiE with money to spend and I want to buy a badge, don’t you think I’m already checking ebay? Isn’t that the first place I’d look? If I’m a representative from a national HQ and it’s my job to rescue badges from the open market, don’t you think I’m already checking ebay? These people are already bidding on these pins, and they have been bidding on them all along. Now they’re just paying more because they’re bidding against their own members, all the while putting more money in the dealers’ hands.

So, I’m not really irked or offended. I just think that while your intentions are commendable, your actions are shortsighted. And I think I have a broader perspective on it because not only am I an NIC fraternity member but I am also a long time collector of GLO badges.

Best Regards,
wptw