When we had our business, I used to go to every auction I could get to. I got lots of office and production furniture and engineering lab equipment. Large companies here like Motorola and Honywell or smaller companies that were selling out, all held auctions. When asked what style our office was decorated in, I'd reply, "early Motorola."
You see an item, you get to touch it, so you know what you're bidding on and you know you get to take it home once you pay the auction company. Still, I learned quickly that some people get caught up in the bidding frenzy and paid more than the item sold for new. And as Pat said, there were the speculators. One "used equipment" character kept overbidding on something and when he won, he asked the guy he was bidding against what that item was. He didn't know, but he told the guy, "if it's worth that to you, I must be able to sell if for more than that in my store."...:curse: Sometimes we were the speculators, buying furniture at really low prices, fixing it up and selling it at a good profit.
It was fun, it was sometimes profitable, but I got a lot of stuff we couldn't otherwise afford. At least in those kinds of auctions, I wasn't bidding against robots....
... or was I???