Many thanks for the replies to The Private Sale Puzzle . Unfortunately, nobody has come up with a logically coherent explanation for why when there are two private parties of equal power, it is the buyer who is expected to take the risk. I think I know the reason why – there probably isn’t one!

If you consider a typical commercial transaction, done at a distance, the buyer is usually the one asked to bear some risk. He or she has to pay money to the seller before goods are despatched. So if you order something through Amazon, for example, you pay first and then they despatch the goods. They don’t send you the latest Celine Dion CD (You didn’t, did you?) and then ask you to pay if you’re satisfied. It’s not how it’s done, and there are good reasons for that.

To continue with the Amazon example for a moment,  the company deals with tens of thousands of transactions every day. It would be impossible for them to chase up every customer who neglected to pay for whatever reason, and so they ask for payment first. Amazon are a company of prominent standing and so they are unlikely to renege on their side of the deal. If they did, they would be very easy track down and be brought to book. And so although their customers are expected to take a risk, it’s a minimal one.

Most commercial organisations doing business at a distance work like this, and by default, private individuals dealing with other private individuals follow the same model – despite the situation being totally different.

In a private transaction, there is just one buyer and one seller. The issues faced by Amazon (and yes, even little old Streetwise Publications) are not present. The two parties to the deal are in exactly the same position, with exactly the same value to gain or lose and pretty much the same hassles and opportunities for redress if it goes wrong. But everyone behaves as though the seller is a high profile commercial organisation, and the buyer is a potentially unreliable customer who might disappear with the goods without paying.

So I believe the reason people behave the way they do in private transactions is that they simply mirror the relative positions of  buyers and sellers in commercial transactions. They take a transaction model from one environment and dump it into an unrelated one – just as it is.

We have a phrase for this kind of thing around here…it’s called ‘chicken on the head thinking’. Why? Well it comes from a half-forgotten parable about a woman who sold cheese at the market. In order to transport the cheese and keep it cool, she wrapped it in muslin and carried it on her head. This was very successful and the product arrived at market cool and fresh. After a while, she decided to move out of cheese and into livestock. She now needed to transport chickens to market, and so encouraged by her previous success, she wrapped them in muslin and…well you get the idea. She took a solution that worked in one situation, and imported it wholesale into a situation with completely different issues and problems.

That’s what I think is probably happening here, and it’s not really unusual. As human beings we’re pretty lazy , and so if we work out a solution to a problem, it’s very tempting to apply it to a different problem. And we do that without employing any critical thinking to determine whether the circumstances are the same. We have the perfect solution – but to the wrong problem.

This sort of thing happens more than you might think. For most of us, the biggest danger comes over time – just like our lady carrying a muslin wrapped chicken on her head. Circumstances change, but we don’t really recognise the fact. We have a solution that once worked, but we are now applying it in a different environment. It no longer works nearly so well, and we can’t figure out why.

So are you using solutions which have proved to work in other environments, but not working the same way for you? Are you using solutions which you’ve used successfully in the past, but they are no longer giving the same results. Maybe it’s worth considering whether…to use the terminology of the day…you’re applying commercial rules to private transactions, or using the transportation arrangements for cheese to move chickens!

One simple question will usually set you on the right track…”Why the hell do we do it like this?”