Personal Gain Retail Selling

[Brett Dikeman]

At 9:35 PM -0800 3/3/03, Greg Johnson wrote:

>Query:  has the rule regarding retail selling on this list for one's own
>personal gain changed?   I don't mean the occasional Car FS stuff, but
>the group buy selling of parts.

It's late and I'm in a rush, but here goes nothing...

If it's in your interests, it has no business here.  If it's in the
interests of listers(like, say, steeply discounted prices via group
purchase for something we all can use for our 200q20v's), then that's
an entirely different ballgame.

   It sounds 'self'(list) serving, and it is.  This list is for
helping owners, not providing people with a free place to sell
products; especially when I was running the list off my own hardware
and internet connection, I really didn't see how anyone had any
business making money off my effort and $.

It becomes tricky when the person organizing the group buy is the
person also doing the selling- it doesn't happen all that often(that
I've known of), and I think that runs an extremely fine line if/when
it does.  It happened very recently, and I won't discuss it further
except to say that it seriously pushed the limits of what I consider
acceptable.

The whole thing can be rather tricky and to be honest there's no
solid way to define a lot of this stuff.  If any lister ever has any
doubt in their mind on the whole no-commercial-postings policy, they
can email me, Chris(c1j1miller at aol.com), or Dan(dans at audifans.com).

The whole Postupak incident has left me with a very bitter taste in
my mouth.  For the most part from what I can tell the 'damage' was
limited in scope, but in my view it's only a matter of time before a
whole lot of listers get screwed on a 'group purchase' that turns
into a 'group scam', or maybe just things aren't organized well and
people get burned somehow as a result even though intentions were
honest.

I've been too busy with a few projects to spend a lot of time
thinking about this, but I think we might have to establish at least
a few ground rules on group purchases.

B
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