I attend a lot of farm clearance auctions and the same mentality manifests at those as well. People will pay over brand new price for items that they don't even know if they work. Other times though people will have no idea what they are looking at and no one else bids and you walk away with the deal of the century for $5 or even less sometimes. I picked up over a tonne of usable steel sections at one auction for $10 when none of the regular scrap dealers turned up.
