Personal Gain Retail Selling

[Greg Johnson]

Brett,

Many thanks for the clarification.  Your thoughts parallel mine.

Greg

Brett Dikeman wrote:

> 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