If you are unfamiliar with eBay, this is the ‘sold items’ page. That means that the auctions closed on these actual amounts. So all that $11.5k and $80k stuff we’ve seen floating around, it’s probably unlikely anyone would actually pay on those auctions.
Back in the day…in the early days of internet sneaker auctions…I witnessed this first hand…I totally didn’t understand why people would just bid up an item and then not pay (still don’t really understand), but I think I got a glimpse into it during one of those crazy early eBay auctions.
I might be butchering this, but I want to say( about 15 years ago, myself and a couple of well known sneaker guys were chatting online (AIM) and sending each other different links to different (live) ebay auctions that we found interesting. One of us came across an auction for the original Jordan XI Concord sample with the ‘45’ on the heel (definitely worn by MJ himself) and it was bid up to around $9k…an absolute UNHEARD OF amount for a pair of sneakers at the time. One of us – I know it wasn’t me – bid the item up to see how high the highest bidder would actually go. Once he was ‘winning’ the auction – he then submitted a bid cancellation request and kept it moving.
From my perspective, two things were accomplished by this action – 1. We got to see what the highest bid would actually be should we want to buy (absolutely not) and 2. We were able to participate in something we saw as historic (even if it was tangentially). We’d joke about it but that must have been SUPER frustrating for the actual seller.
Anyways, I’m sure there was a bit of that going on in these auctions. People are just wanting to be a part of the madness…even I could see someone out there actually paying $2.5k for this crap (not that I would drop more than $2.50 on it)…if someone would ACTUALLY cough up $80k for 3 oreos, we might as well just end humanity.
