Hey Charlie Brown, Wanna Kick A Football?

I loved the Peanuts as a kid and on Halloween, like a religious ritual, I’d watch “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” before going out for tricks or treats. Every year I’d watch Lucy con Charlie Brown into trying to kick a football that she yanks away at the last second. I imagine that some of the successful bidders in the most recent Memory Lane auction feel a bit like Charlie Brown: flat on their backs with nothing to show for it and that feeling they’ve been had.

Full disclosure: none of my doggies are in this fight. I am not a consignor nor did I win anything in the auction. I have no skin in the game, no stake in the outcome, just a bundle of opinions.

What made Memory Lane’s most recent auction such a mess is straightforward enough, aptly summarized by Rich Mueller at Sports Collectors Daily:

“A shipment of more than $2 million worth of baseball cards intended for display at last month’s Strongsville Sports Collectors Convention is missing….54 high value cards…are believed to have been stolen after a box arrived at the Best Western Plus Hotel the day before the show was set to open. …Memory Lane Auctions shipped the package from its Southern California headquarters via FedEx during the week of April 14. …According to the company, security cameras reviewed by police show the heavy duty brown cardboard box being delivered and signed for. However, when a Memory Lane employee who had arrived in advance of the show went to pick it up on April 18, hotel employees couldn’t locate the box.”

In short, some turd who deserves to be locked up and forced to sort 1989 Donruss sets until his brain melts stole the cards from the a Best Western between April 14 and April 18. Awful, but hopefully there is insurance for the loss and the consignors will be made whole. Simple enough, yet…not.

Let’s start with the idiotic logistics decision Memory Lane made. I have absolutely no criticism of FedEx, the carrier. The cards were successfully delivered as ordered. But delivered to who, exactly, and into what security arrangements? FedEx is part of a secured logistics industry that moves small high value items from point to point and can securely store them on arrival until retrieval, if requested. I've researched this issue in the past when looking for a cross-country option for moving my collection. Memory Lane could readily have had the box stored securely in FedEx’s facility where opportunistic theft by some passing bumpkin would be a non-issue. Relying on the hotel to hold a $2,000,000.00 box of stuff is just plain naïve, negligent and stupid. Ever read the notice posted on the inside of your hotel door? If you did, you know that hotels everywhere are protected by state laws from liability for your lost stuff. These innkeeper laws cap liability for a lost package or item, and the number is laughably small. You think hotel management is going to guard that box with their lives when management knows that its maximum exposure is the cost of a trip to Applebee’s? Yeah, pull the other leg, it plays “Jingle Bells.”

Alright, bone-headed logistics decisions were made, the cards got ripped, now what to do, what to do? My first impulse is to think “hey, the cards are gone and I can’t deliver them if someone wins them, so maybe I should withdraw the lots and send an explanatory email to the bidders?” Americans are a really fair-minded, forgiving bunch, especially when you’ve been the victim of a crime. I mean, if you get mugged on the way to the restaurant to meet me for dinner, I am not going to be mad at you for being late. Apparently, that wasn’t good enough for Memory Lane, no siree. Instead, the brains trust decided to let the missing items run to completion. No, I am not joking; Memory Lane ran an auction for 54 cards that it could not deliver to the winning bidders. It then sent them ‘Dear John’ emails informing them that they lost even though they won.

Memory Lane says that whoever won these lots will have the right to purchase them at the winning price if the cards are recovered. Gee, thanks. The cards might still be recovered, someday, but for all we know, the cards are in a dumpster outside a Dairy Queen or at the bottom of Lake Erie if the thief panicked and decided they were too hot to sell at the swap meet. For all we know, the cards may never be seen again. What is a bidder who set aside a substantial amount to pay for a win supposed to do now? I dunno about you, but I cannot afford to set aside tens of thousands of dollars from my card budget for an indeterminate amount of time on the hope that something might turn up. There are many more auctions every month and I need to move on and reallocate my capital.

From a business standpoint, allowing the auction to run to completion on cards that were stolen a few weeks earlier just baffles me. To be fair, I can see letting the lots run for a while until the company could be sure the box wasn’t just misplaced, or in the hope that the police might quickly catch the thief or recover the cards, and I would have advised a client of mine in this bind to do that. After two weeks, though, when the closing date arrives and the cards are still missing, I think it is time to throw in the towel and withdraw the items. This is especially true for a California-based company like Memory Lane. Cali has a host of consumer protection laws and regulations that are not lenient on businesses that cannot deliver on their promises. For example, CA Business & Professions Code 17200 prohibits unfair or fraudulent business practices, or unfair, deceptive, untrue, or misleading advertising. Offering something for sale to the highest bidder that you don’t have and don’t have any reasonable prospect of delivering to a purchaser seems to me to fit squarely in the deceptive, untrue or misleading advertising category. Then there are the auction regulation laws. CA Civ Code Section 1812.605(c) requires that all auctions "Truthfully represent the goods to be auctioned." I’d say that offering to auction off cards that are not available does not truthfully represent the goods to be auctioned. Again, these are my opinions and others may feel differently. That said, I know that if a client presented me with these facts, I’d consider these laws and my advice would not be “sure, run it anyway and let people think they’ve won the cards, then tell them nope, sorry Losers.”

Apart from legalities, why would Memory Lane disappoint so many customers by running an auction it can't fulfill when the alternative was to pull the stolen lots, explain what happened, and run them later if the cards are recovered? Why choose to piss off so many bidders and create a shit-storm of negative discussion on social media when good will and sympathy were there for the taking? I think it's just a lousy thing to do to the collectors who went out of their way to participate in the auction. Golden Rule and all…

What dismays me even more than how badly Memory Lane handled the situation is that a sizable group of collectors, dealers and auctioneers defend the decision to let the auction run as though the cards were available. It was a barnburner of an auction. It ran until 3:00 a.m. Eastern Time and some bidders reported staying up all night to bid. Can you imagine staying up into the wee hours of the morning to add that special item to your collection, only to experience the thrill of victory quickly followed by the agony of defeat (any WWoS fans here?) when you are told the cards cannot be delivered? If Heritage had emailed me a few weeks ago and told me that the signed Joe Louis card I won the night before was actually not available, I’d have been really, really disappointed and really, really pissed off at Heritage for leading me on.

The people who think that subjecting their fellow collectors to that sort of thing is just dandy, I bet they root against Charlie Brown every time; let’s call them the Lucys. The Lucys justify it on the basis that the auction closings would set a true market price for the insurance claim. I guess, but the way it was done effectively made every bidder on these cards an unwitting participant in a market pricing survey instead of the advertised auction. Call me a selfish old fart, but I don’t like having my time wasted, and I sure as hell would not want to stay up all night chasing an item for my collection when in actuality all I was doing was generating data points for an auctioneer’s insurance claim…unless they pay me for my time. I bill out at $500 an hour; fork over the jack, bub, and I’ll guzzle Red Bull, work through a box of Pop-Tarts, and bid away all night long.

Another defense I hear is that Memory Lane is the victim of the crime and should not be criticized. Sorry, nope. The two things can be true at the same time: Memory Lane can be both the victim of a crime and have done something selfish and unfair to its bidders.

I am especially surprised by the professionals in the field who jump to Memory Lane’s defense. I understand that what Memory Lane did with the shipping is pretty much standard logistics practice among auction houses and dealers and that some of them feel defensive about any criticism of actions that they routinely take. Rather than getting their panties in a wad, however, I would suggest instead that this sorry episode should serve as a cautionary tale and teachable moment on good logistics practices. Here’s a novel thought, guys: if you are taking two million dollars in goods that fit into a backpack to a show, have the cards hand-carried on the plane in a backpack. Fifty-odd slabs are readily taken on a plane; I’ve done it coming home from shows. Or pop for an extra two hundred bucks in hotel costs and have the staffer who was supposed to get the cards at the front desk arrive a day earlier to go pick up the cards at the carrier’s secure depot. I cannot believe that the management at any auction house or dealership would instead choose to send small boxes of extremely valuable items with about the same level of care assumed to be provided on arrival as Aunt Edna assumes the family will give to her ugly-ass Christmas sweater giftbox at Christmas. What do they expect hotel staff to do with a $2,000,000.00 shoebox, stick the box under the tree and hope that no one decides to play Bad Santa and jack it? Because that is the level of care that the hotel will give it.

Memory Lane: not impressed.

I’m at the Front Row card show next weekend in Pasadena. Come by and visit. I’ll have more vintage cards and oddball items for sale than ever before, including a nice run of rock and roll memorabilia, pubs and fanzines that I recently picked up.