As of Tuesday early evening, two days into bidding, there are thirty-six bids spread across a hundred and thirty-three items.
If you read that and worry on our behalf, please do not. Silent auctions do not build steadily. They sit quiet for a week and a half and then nearly everything happens at once in the last forty-eight hours. This is what day two looks like.
But it does mean something useful for you. Right now, almost nothing in this catalog is spoken for.
What has no bids on it at all
The cruise through Glacier Bay. The golf cart. Three nights in the cottage with the round purple door. The signed Bobby Witt Jr. bat. The Reid and Spagnuolo plaque. Four cubic yards of topsoil. The Sugar Ray Leonard boxing glove. Seven of the nine Milwaukee lots. The seven-piece Fitz & Floyd Christmas collection. And forty-nine separate items that open at twenty-five dollars or less.
A hundred and two items out of a hundred and thirty-three. If you looked earlier, assumed something was already gone, and closed the tab — go look again. It is almost certainly still sitting there.
The thing most people get wrong
The common assumption about an online auction is that you have to be there at the end. That you need to be awake, holding your phone, at 7:44 on a Sunday evening, ready to tap faster than somebody else.
You do not. And the people who win things at this auction are generally the ones who figured that out early.
How a maximum bid works
When you bid, the site does not ask only what you want to pay right now. It asks the most you would be willing to pay. Those are different numbers, and the second one is the useful one.
Say the topsoil opens at $500 and you decide it is worth $650 to you. You enter $650 as your maximum. The site bids $500 on your behalf — not $650 — and then sits there quietly on your side. If somebody bids $525, the site answers for you at $550 and you do not lift a finger. It keeps doing that, one increment at a time, until either everybody else stops or the bidding passes $650, at which point it stops and tells you that you have been outbid.
You never pay your maximum unless somebody actually pushes you there. You pay one increment above whatever the next person was willing to pay. So there is no penalty for being honest about your number, and there is a real cost to being coy about it: the person who sets a maximum beats the person who is at dinner.
Which means you can go live your life
Set your maximums this week. Then close the tab and forget about it. Go to work, go to your kid’s game, go to bed at a reasonable hour on November 8. The site will defend your bids while you are not looking, and it will email you if somebody passes you.
That is the whole trick. It is not a secret and it is not clever — it just gets ignored every year by people who then feel terrible on Sunday night.
And nobody wins by sniping
One more thing, because it changes how the last hour feels. A bid placed in an item’s final three minutes pushes that item’s closing time back by three more minutes. It can keep extending up to half an hour.
So nothing gets stolen at 7:44 and fifty-nine seconds, and nothing you wanted slips away because you stepped off to get a plate of food. If somebody wants it more than you do, they will have to say so out loud and give you the chance to answer. That is a better way to run an auction and a much better way to spend an evening.
If you only do one thing this week
Open the catalog, find the two or three things you actually want, and set a maximum on each one. It takes about four minutes. Then let it go.
One more thing while you are here
The 50/50 raffle is running alongside the auction and it works the way it sounds — half the pot goes home with one person, half goes to the children in our care. Tickets are $5, five for $20, or twenty for $50, and sales close at 7:30 PM on November 8, fifteen minutes before the lots begin closing. No extensions on that one. You do not need to be in the room to win; we will call you.
As of 5:30pm Tuesday, the pot is up to $270 of our $1,600 goal!
And then come eat with us
Sunday, November 8. Doors at 6:00, the program begins at 6:30, at the Heart of Life Garden City campus. It is free, there is dinner, children are welcome, and you do not have to bid on anything to come. Bring somebody.
