"There are some valid reasons for conducting a private auction, that would make a neat discussion. Sometimes it's done for nefarious reasons, but quite often, it's a good idea for both seller and bidders."

Michael (see I remembered),

I agree. My first email to Ebay was to suggest that they make all auctions private which would limit the people who could harvest my email address for spam purposes.

However I think you have to agree that its a little odd that only one of his auctions is private especially where the suggestion of his description is that he has control over all these chips (they all been sitting in those boxes). He never says how many were ordered but realistically how many would you expect a fraternal organization to buy. Therefore he can't really be concerned that other people are going to try to sell these chips in lots of 1000 to his bidders.

I don't know anything about these chips,and if it weren't for Gene's post I might be inclined to accecpt that his description might be accurate, but the private auction thing in this context just makes it seem a little off. I would feel differently if all of the sellers auctions were private.

Of course with the benefit of Gene's post it all becomes clearer.

less filling