I hadn't been to a fur sale in many years until NAFA went under. Since then I have been to a few, and for the last few years I have helped out at the ITA sale. It started out by jumping in to cover for someone while they took a bathroom break while I was there checking in fur and slowly morphed into showing up before the sale started and staying until after it is over. Of the sales I have been to, ITA is undoubtedly the best for the sellers. They allow all sorts of stuff on their sale, and actually have buyers for it show up. This means a trapper can bring everything he wants to sell to one place. Furs, skulls, baculum, glands, horns, traps and trapping equipment, even mounts can all be sold. There are usually a couple bear and cougar hides, maybe a cowhide and this year I checked in a goat hide. If it is legal to sell, they will take it. This draws in the crafters and anybody can get a bid sheet and bid on things that don't require a fur buyers license. There is always some tanned fur if you want a particular animal to hang on your wall, and tanned fur doesn't require a furbuyers license. Or Fish and Game will be there at least one day, selling furbuyers licenses. It is like a snowball, the more stuff you have, the more buyers show up, the more buyers show up, the more sellers show up, the more sellers show up, the more stuff you get. And the more buyers you have, the more chances you'll have multiple buyers interested in your items, the more buyers interested in your items, the higher the prices.
Now of course some markets can be flooded, and some easier than others. The skull market seems easy to flood, for example beaver skulls went for just cents this year. I talked to the big skull buyer that always is there and he told me, "I will buy them all, but I can buy beaver skulls by the freezer load, so I am not paying much for them." He has years worth of inventory of them.
There have been many discussions on how to improve various aspects of the sale. It has grown quickly in just a few years to be the biggest sale in the west (possibly in the US but I know nothing about sales back east) and you can't expect it not to have a few growing pains, but Rusty works very hard at trying to have everyone, buyer or seller, leave satisfied with the sale aspect. This causes some of the delays as they don't turn fur away, both Friday and Saturday nights I was there until after midnight checking in fur, if you showed up and turned your paperwork in by the time on the schedule, we are going to be there until it is checked in, then when all that is done, regardless of the time, Rusty starts bringing in boxes of shipped in fur that arrived after the deadline, we did a whole truckload of boxes that arrived Thursday and Friday, then Saturday night we did more that his dad brought down that arrived Saturday. I'm sure he is still getting boxes showing up at his house. If someone is shipping fur to the sale, I highly recommend shipping early so it can be gone through and put out before the sale starts. And send a list of what furs you have in each box, how you want them lotted, etc. It really slows things down when we have to go through and see what you have and decide how they should be lotted. Leaving easily found instructions is very helpful, and DON'T forget your NAME! We had multiple boxes that Rusty had to have one of the girls google the address to find out whose furs they were, and at least one I'm aware of that had no return address on it.
I know nothing about computer systems, but that seems to be one of the biggest things slowing things down, if that could be expedited, it would be a tremendous help, next would be the buyers getting their bids in, in a timely manner. But you can only rush buyers so much, before they either don't bid on stuff they haven't looked at, or give lowball offers on a bunch of stuff they just gave a cursory glance to. That is counter productive.
I tend to help on the fur check side of things a lot, so I feel more comfortable commenting on that. Overall it seems to go fairly smoothly, just the vast volumes we have had the last couple years slows it down. Show up early and expect to be there a while. If you are new and don't know how to lot or minimum your stuff, we are more than happy to help you. But at least try to pay attention and learn. Have your furs and other items organized and know what you have. If you can put everything on the table in order and tell us what it is, it goes smoother. For example, if you have four lots of skunks, have them seperated, we usually delineate lots by putting zip ties through the eyes, one lot red, next green, etc. Not the lot zip tied together, we just have to cut them apart so the buyers can look at each hide to grade, but a zip tie through each individual fur. We had a few sellers who had done that at home, this was very nice. Run through all your skunks, then do all your coons, then all your coyotes, etc. Dumping a pile of coons, skunks and rock chucks on the table, with no idea of how many of each are in the pile or how you want them lotted slows things down. If you have a couple hundred rats, put them in cardboard boxes and write on the boxes how many are in each box. Yes, we have to count and verify, but if we come up with the same count as you, we only have to count once, and large lots of rats are going to go in boxes on the tables so they don't end up slithered everywhere. So you bringing them that way means we don't have to find boxes of the right size. These are little things that the individual sellers can do to help, any one of them won't save a lot of time, but they will make things run smoother and every little bit helps. We are happy to help, or provide suggestions, but if you know how you want your furs lotted ahead of time, having them organized helps. I know a number of sellers that have came to this sale (myself included) specifcally because they allow you to lot your fur how you want, and to have as many lots as you desire. Speeding things up by creating disgruntled sellers or causing them to take their furs elsewhere is not helpful.
