Opportunism
In life you are presented with moments of extreme opportunity, sometimes you can see it while others you don't, deciding whether to act at the chance is a decision in the hands of whom the opportunity is presented. When I was a Sophomore in high school I was given a very opportunistic chance and did not act upon it. My brother is six years older then me, and he has a passion for cars. He loves to buy them on a regular basis, for the right price, and then sell them later for a profit. After he had been doing this for multiple years, while having extreme success, he wanted to teach the trade to me. He found a car that he told me was extremely under priced and told me that he would let me buy it, allowing him to mentor me through the process. It was a bright red 1987 Corvette with only 52,000 miles on it, all while in beautiful condition. The owner was asking only $4,500 for the car, my brother went on Ebay and showed me that the exact same model with 57,000 miles sold for $8,000 a week prior.
It was very clear that this car was a extremely underpriced, a car that I could make a ton of money on, and a great opportunity. However, I was too afraid to pull the trigger on it. I kept thinking of things that could happen to the car, all of the what ifs were killing me. At the end of the day, I let my brother have it for himself, he ended up buying the car for $4300 and selling it for $8,000. While I did miss this great opportunity, it was a wake up call for me. That car showed me how lucrative this could be for me and how easily it was to do. After that missed opportunity I diligently searched for good deals and ran them through with my brother. When I did find an opportunity I did not run away from it this time around, I jumped at it. To this day I am still buying cars and selling them for a profit. With school I am limited to my summers, but it is a fun hobby that pays for a good portion of my school, all while also giving me a car to drive.
I would say that the various explanations all tie together. In my eyes being a "good citizen" means you abide by the rules, essentially being unethical. If you are doing unethical things, like for example stealing, then you are not being a good person. Even though it may be tempting to steal the delicious cake while no one is looking, it is not ethical and it is not what a "good citizen" would do. The last explanation is that "good things come to those who wait" and that people are patient. This relates to being unethical as well as being a "good citizen". For example, it is really tempting to take the cake that is right in front of you, but if you don't take the cake then when you eat later the food you eat will be that much better. Essentially, being ethical, a "good citizen", and waiting to eat food later over stealing the cake allowed for that person to be better off. For that reason I would say that the reasons you stated amount to the same thing and are all related.
Please put the titles of your post where they belong, in the Post Title area, not in the body of the post.
ReplyDeleteYour example of not pulling the trigger is interesting, but it doesn't demonstrate what is at issue in this prompt, unless you feel that the seller of the corvette was being robbed, by under pricing the car. As a general matter, the price of an item that does not have very good substitutes can be hard to pin down. The transactions are not that frequent. The reasons for sale may be a large determinant of price. As you suggest, such a market can produce quite a handsome profit. But if you don't have a ready buyer for resale there is also risk that you might sit on the merchandise for a while till it sells. And in the interim general market conditions can change that impact the resale price.
If you saw the movie The Big Short, or if you read the book, you know that many people were making money by flipping condos, particularly in southern states, Florida and Arizona for example. The market worked great, until it didn't work at all.
in any event, if you don't feel that your ripping off the original owner by purchasing the car at a low price, there is not ethical issue to consider her, and hence no issue of opportunism.
In the future I will not post the title in the blog itself, sorry for doing so. Regarding the post itself, I don't necessarily think I am ripping these individuals off since they are happy to sell the car for that price, but I do think their are some ethics involved. For instance, their motive for selling the car may be for medical reasons, they may need the money to allocate for their future health safety. If this is the case, I would feel unethical buying the car for such a good deal when they could be making more money on it for their health reasons.
DeleteI have had this happen to me before, where the owner told me he had to sell the car for surgery, he was basically letting the car go for free. I felt this to be an ethical issue to buy the car at his asking price, so what I did was give him an extra $1,000 on top of what he was asking. When it was all said and done, he was extremely thankful for what I did and I still made a handsome return on the car itself. Maybe this is a better example of opportunism since it has a direct ethical issue involved with the decision.
I find your post interesting in many ways. First off, I think that this hobby that you acquired through your brother is very unique and something that you'll look back on fondly, especially if it is helping with college expenses. I think that when thinking about this post in an opportunistic way, you could focus more on the seller of the car when talking about why you didn't pull the trigger the first time around.
ReplyDeleteI myself had a bit trouble with my blog post, as it seems like many people did in our class about what opportunism really was I think that if the reason you didn't purchase the car was because you felt empathy towards the original seller and the value they didn't know they had that your post would've been perfect, since the idea of opportunism is supposed to be around a choice that may be unethical.