eMoviePoster.com

A few weeks ago, we received this comment:

"Those at eMoviePoster.com who are responsible for accurately grading the condition of each item and performing this most critical aspect of your auctions deserve tremendous kudos. The tedious and time consuming difficulty of this aspect of auctioning must be a daunting challenge.
     I'm looking at a Lebanese poster I recently won to a favorite spaghetti western of mine.' You listed it as "good to very good", and it surely would have been overgraded elsewhere!
     I was stunned by it's beauty! This is not the first this has happened to me, just the latest! We collectors all express a collective thank you to those at eMoviePoster.com who do the condition grading of the posters!"

I replied as follows:

I agree that grading posters is perhaps the hardest job here. It not only takes a lot of knowledge and experience, but it also requires a lot of concentration over many hours time each day, during which time that person looks at 100 or more posters, which can be really headache producing!

So you need a VERY special person to do this job, one who has the knowledge necessary to do the job right, and that knowledge can ONLY be learned through "on the job training", and it takes a year or more (of grading tens of thousands of posters) before you REALLY have a feel for how to accurately grade them, and what to "look out for" (because otherwise, you are sure to miss a lot).

Since almost every auction only auctions a few thousand posters a year, they can't find someone who has time to learn all they need to learn to "do the job right". But there is another reason besides inexperienced graders who many auctions, as you point out, overgrade what they auction.

They surely succumb to the temptation to "gloss over" or "miss" defects and give items a better grade than they deserve, in the hopes of causing the item to sell for more than it should. They know there is a real chance that the buyer will be unsophisticated, and not realize the item was overgraded, or that the buyer might be a nice person who doesn't like to return things, and who therefore "just keeps it".

Those auctions who do this over-grading may THINK they come out ahead doing so, and in the short term they do, but I contend they are being "penny wise and pound foolish", because VERY often that buyer never buys from them again, and this hobby is far too small to be "burning" buyers (and it is why auctions with such practices have to keep doing LOTS of expensive advertising, trying to find new buyers to replace the ones they ran off in the past.

Incidentally, when I started auctioning on the Internet, I (Bruce) was the person who did the condition grading on EVERY single item will auctioned! I kept that going until we added a second set of auctions each week, and at that point I trained someone else to also do the job. Now, we have two full-time employees who do nothing but grade posters each week, but I still do a fair share of the items each week, and they always set aside the top items for me to grade, and I always grade every single item in our Major Auctions, which is why I am so exhausted as of this writing, because I just finished grading ALL the incredible items in our August Major Auction!

And now you know exactly why it is that our items are the most accurately and honestly graded movie paper items in any auction anywhere!