Auctions

The Observation We require identity verification on the website: a picture of your ID and a selfie. A few customers a week call and say, there’s no way I’m giving you my ID. Almost always, the reason is identity theft. So I ask them, what do you think they do with that stolen identity? They target businesses that aren’t doing identity checks like we do. To that, they almost always go, “Oh, I’ve never thought about that side of it.” Almost selfishly, if you ask me. They’ve only ever pictured themselves as the victim, never the business that gets stuck with the bill. ...

When we ran simulcast auctions, with people bidding in the room and online, I heard the same suspicion time and again. The people in the room thought the internet had an advantage, and the people online thought the floor did. I think putting those two methods of bidding into the same auction can create distrust. Each group competes against people whose way of participating differs from its own. That gives bidders another reason to question whether everyone has the same opportunity to compete. ...

By John Schultz, CAI, AMM | Grafe Auction Company This article describes our experience with Nebraska’s auction-house permit process in August and September 2026. When a retailer closes, the remaining alcohol inventory can create a question that doesn’t come up with shelving or refrigeration: can we include it in the auction? Nebraska now has an auction-house permit for qualifying alcohol sales, and our experience obtaining one offers a place to start. ...

The Observation I was thinking this morning about friction in technology, and how a good customer will leave without a word. A little is useful. Too much, and they just give up. The local coffee shop is a franchise I go to all the time. A few months ago they released a new mobile app to replace the old one. The new one has latency problems. Flaky at best, worse around 8 in the morning, less bad mid-morning. A colleague and I were talking about it in the office. We wondered if the app is silently failing and they don’t even realize they’re hitting a bandwidth wall at the rush. ...

The Observation Paul Ampe would dictate letters. I didn’t know shorthand. So I’d catch the sense, then put the words back in his mouth. Paraphrase first. Then write like him. That was only the start of the drill. Sometimes I had to research. I’d dig, report back, and he’d dictate again from what we’d learned. Shared thinking. His knowledge and my research mixed into one letter. The page left the building as his voice, for his practice, for the client. Not as a memo that announced I had synthesized something clever in the back room. ...

How I became someone who could teach is not why I still do. The origin story is real. It just isn’t the ignition. I can still see sixth grade like it was this morning. Small town. Upsala, Minnesota. Grade of about thirty kids. I was not very good at math. I can see the room. The desk at the front. Me bending over it. My teacher telling me it’s okay. Some people are just not good at math, she said, and never will be. ...

The Observation I rolled off as Board Chair of the National Auction Association. The gavel moves. The calendar clears a little. Then the letters arrive. I expected thanks. I expected kindness. What I did not fully expect was the mirror. A few people quoted phrases I say without thinking. Most people did not quote me at all. They described the same few things: showing up when the path was muddled, teaching when the easier move was to protect my time, making room for people who were still figuring out whether they belonged, and caring more about getting a hard call right than about winning the room that day. ...

After a foodservice liquidation, the survey scores came in. Same complaint, different names. The display piece mounted high on the wall. The scramble for help. Paying someone to take down what they already bought. Our invoice terms were clean. The buyer removes their lots. Onsite help is fee-based, not staff. High mounts and wall pieces were always going to be the buyer’s problem under the paper. I still kept catching recovery notes that apologized for the terms. “You shouldn’t have had to climb.” “You shouldn’t have had to pay for help.” That sounds kind. It also rewrites the deal after the gavel. ...

The Observation I was listening to Lex Fridman with Julia Shaw on the bystander effect, and the piece that stuck was simple: if you’re not first on the scene, you look at the other faces to figure out what this is. Calm faces mean “not an emergency.” Your calm becomes data for the next person who walks up. Lex’s point was that most people think they’d resist evil, or step up on a street when something bad is happening. Most people don’t. You have to simulate the hard act of resisting, or of intervening, because in the moment it’s not easy. ...

The Observation I spent a long day scoring auctioneers. Prelims first. Then finals: interview, then selling again. Prelims decide who keeps competing. They ask a hard question: can you call bids under pressure, in front of people who do this for a living? That skill is real. It’s not the whole title. The final score is not the prelim run again. You sit and answer for the trade. Then you sell again on the block. Only people who advance face that second test. ...