Unreal request

I am seeing this happen more and more and more...

People are basing their expectations on ebay auctions. They want to squeeze every possible dollar worth of value out of their material. I recently saw a post on this very forum somewhere where someone was talking about getting $9.99 per ounce for fingerboards. So this is what happens.

Someone posts an unrealistic price for scrap on ebay. Then someone who either is investing and hoarding, or investing to process but is new, purchases the item. Everyone that follows and sees what was paid for the material then wants to make the same for large amounts. Yet, you never see anyone selling 1lb of fingerboards for $160.00. Ever.

A great example are Pentium Pros. I can tell you with utmost certainty that there is only .33 grams of gold per Pentium CPU. That's it, there is nothing more. Yet there is a list floating around the internet that claims they contain 1.0 grams. This is what happens on ebay.

People purchase Pentium Pros for their perceived gold content. I have seen auctions where the winning bidder won, and happily paid, $55.00 per chip. Even though there is only really about $16-$17 dollars worth of gold in the CPU. There is a good reason why the are purchases CPUs and hoarding them, it's far more difficult to fake a CPU than it is to fake a gold bar. Yet because they do not process the CPUs, and because there is so much bad information floating around about their yields, and because often times the CPUs are hoarded instead of processed, the general belief is that they are work about $50.00 per CPU.

There is also another misconception about CPUs. I have processed a lot of ceramic CPUs, I don't touch transitional nor fiber, but Ceramic I have a lot of experience with. Lb per lb, the double gold cap CPUs yield far more than Pentium Pros.

Now imagine this. The people who are purchasing the scrap off ebay, to refine for the first time loose money. Then they never try to process again. You have not created a customer, you have destroyed another person's ability to make a living at what cost, so that the person selling the scrap can make more profit than the scrap contained?

It goes back to the old saying for me, give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, or teach a man how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Translated to relate to this it might read something like. Sell scrap to a refiner at a price they make no profit and they will refine for a day, or allow the refiner to make a fair profit and he will process for a lifetime. Sometimes it's not about how much money each one of us makes as individuals, sometimes it's about making your customer strong so they purchase more from you, so everyone makes more money.

Also remember this. People who have huge amounts of scrap do for a reason, usually it's because they are asking far too much for it for anyone to make a profit. I wouldn't purchase just on principle alone. I would seek instead the guy who has 10 lbs, but has 10 lbs every week, rather than someone who claims to have 100s of lbs of material.

Scott