Rose,

Thank you SO MUCH for taking this to facebook (and for all who took the time to reply). I was armed with information this morning at my auction meeting, and after years of discounting baskets in the last 20 minutes, we have decided to keep the prices as is.

Karen

It depends on the item - if it is something that is time sensitive, then I would definitely lower it. I would rather get some money for an item than nothing if no one purchases it. I understand the frustration of working hard to get donation items and then having no one bid on them. Sometimes we will hold over items and use them for another event, but we also reduce them towards the end of the evening. We don't have space to store a bunch of auction baskets, so we try hard to get them sold!

I do not recommend discounting silent auction items during last 15 minutes. We've done it before ad would encourage those in attendance to make a bid. Last year we had several baskets or items with no bid and ended up letting numerous items go at very low bids. We had over 200 items total. It was hard to realize how low some of them were going. One of the ladies who had worked hard getting some of the items was very upset. We had meeting several weeks following our bazaar and decide to hold over items with no bid and give our committee an opportunity to "buy" them and the to offer items on our web site. It seems that some folks would come in towards end of silent auction to get the bargains. We plan to announce at beginning of silent auction that we will not ask for anything lower than starting bid on any items this year. We are a church and this year we will have our 27th annual bazaar