{"id":1080,"date":"2026-01-13T15:38:25","date_gmt":"2026-01-13T15:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/?p=1080"},"modified":"2026-01-13T15:38:25","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T15:38:25","slug":"lucky-goodwill-bid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/?p=1080","title":{"rendered":"Lucky Goodwill Bid"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Anyone who follows my blog will know that I do a lot of shopping on ShopGoodwill.com. The other day I found a used air fryer with a starting price of $9.99. This model was going for around $50 on Ebay, so I put it on my favorites list. The next day someone placed the first bid. I decided to put in my bid 11 hours before the end of the auction. My max bid was $26.50, and the price jumped to $16. I knew the max bid of the first bidder was $15. About 5 1\/2 hours later, someone put in a bid of $17 and my bid automatically moved to $18. Just before the auction closed, someone placed a bid for $26.52. They had placed a bid 2 cents higher than mine on the first try and won the auction!  With tax and shipping their final price would be about $47.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The auction had a $1 bid increment, so I looked at the help section under bidding on an item. The first question on the list was: &#8220;Why was the winning bid less than the bid increment amount higher than my bid?&#8221;. This tells me that this happens often enough to be the number one question people ask about bidding. Here is the example they give: &#8220;If the first bidder enters a bid of $11, the item price would remain $10 but the next minimum bid would increase to at least $11.00. Any bid amount $11.00 or higher would then be acceptable. Therefore, the next bidder could then enter a bid amount of $11.02. They would then become the high bidder, the item price would increase to $11.02, and the next minimum bid would become $12.02.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I guess this can go both ways. If they had bid $26.49, I would have won. But since their bid was more than the $1 bid increment and higher than my bid, they won the auction. The thing that has me skeptical is that the bid price at the time was $18. They decided to put in a bid that was $8.52 higher, which just happened to be 2 cents higher than my max bid. How can this happen, unless you knew what my max bid was? Seems like more than just a lucky bid could be in play here. I can&#8217;t prove anything, but Goodwill has a track record of questionable hiring and pricing behavior. How hard would it be for an insider to view the max bids and use that information in their favor. I&#8217;ve been on Ebay since 2010 and have never lost an auction by such an unusually close margin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Anyone who follows my blog will know that I do a lot of shopping on ShopGoodwill.com. The other day I found a used air fryer with a starting price of $9.99. This model was going for around $50 on Ebay, so I put it on my favorites list. The next<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1080"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1081,"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080\/revisions\/1081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}