Fountain City Auction’s 20th Annual Advertising Auction is Saturday, January 4
By Ken Leinart
There is the sound, ever so slight in the 10,000-square foot Fountain City Auction building, and then another sound of an object being moved.
“I’m going to get you,” FCA staffer Kristal Ray said. Her voice is low, almost a whisper, but in these spacious surroundings it travels well and it carries its intended mock menace with it.
“You’re in trouble,” she said.
Fountain City Auction’s annual Advertising Auction is nine days away and Ray and FCA owner Greg Lawson are double and triple-checking catalog numbers on items that will be on the block during the Jan. 4, 2025, auction.
“What did I do …” Lawson begins to say, but stops short as he continues looking over a selection of vintage signs, reviewing catalog numbers again.The building is about a third full of items for the Advertising Auction. In the next nine days, it will fill up.
This is the lull before the Jan. 4 storm and it’s a storm that has been building since the January 2024 Advertising Auction.
Fountain City Auction holds weekly online auctions throughout the year – every Friday and an occasional Saturday – but this Saturday’s Advertising Auction is the Big Daddy.
Think of a word that means “Huge,” and “Massive,” and “Eclectic,” and “Popular,” and “Fun,” and if you come up with that word, you’ve summed up the Advertising Auction.
Items have been selected, salted away, stored, put aside by vendors and by FCA staffers for the last 12 months just waiting for the annual Advertising Auction.
“We’ll have ‘specialty’ item auctions … Jewelry, estate auctions, furniture. But the Advertising Auction is a sort of crossover because there can be anything,” Lawson said. “This year we’re combining it with a country store and primitive auction.”
The success of any auction depends on the number of bidders and Lawson said during a weekly auction event there can be as many as 500 bidders. Jan. 4 will make that seem like the warm-up band before a Taylor Swift concert.
“And it depends on the items and the buyers,” Lawson said. The Jan. 4 auction will be the 20th edition of the Advertising Auction and, since the first one in 2004, this event has exploded in popularity.
“It’s just grown and grown and grown over the years,” Lawson said. It really took off, however, during a very scary time – the COVID lockdown.
Lawson said pre-COVID, there would be 300 chairs in the building and the crowds were still standing-room-only affairs.
But when COVID hit … “When COVID hit we went over 6,000 bidders,” he said of the first pandemic Advertising Auction that was online only.
There is another factor at play in the success of FCA and the Advertising Auction. Staying online only is certainly a big factor, but there is Lawson, himself, and that is the one factor that defies description.
Despite the reliance on computers and the modern-day technology needed to hold an online auction, there is a sense of old school work ethic and a code of honor where a person is only as good as their word, a goal of doing the job right.
FCA is a business, make no mistake about that, but Lawson doesn’t see it as an enterprise to just enrich himself.
Consider this: Parents or grandparents find themselves, by necessity, moving to an assisted living facility; a spouse dies.
“What are they going to do?” Lawson asked. “I’ll visit three to five homes a week sometimes. And I’m talking with a heartbroken spouse or to someone who is putting their parents in assisted living. ‘What am I going to do?’ they ask. It’s a hand-holding session. Yes, I’m sorry for your loss, for these circumstances, but I believe your spouse (or loved ones) would want you to get some money from these items they have. To help you, to help your children.”
And that’s the heart of Lawson. His first thoughts aren’t about what his profit will be, it’s about how he can help this person during an uncertain and trying time in their lives
“I work for the seller. To help them,” Lawson said. “It’s my job to bring the buyers in.”
And he delivers. Lawson said it’s common for people to contact him and say something like, “You helped when my parents died,” or “You helped when someone else’s parents died,” or “You did my grandparents’ house.”
Treat people fairly and honestly and work hard for them and things will take care of themselves.
“It’s a people business,” he said. “That’s how you network and develop. Word of mouth is the best thing you have and we have full confidence in that.”
Lawson was an only child raised on a farm. He said his parents taught him early the value of hard work, the value of keeping his word.
“I probably thought at the time it was child slavery,” Lawson said with a laugh. “But those were some of the best years of my life. My parents were molding me and you can’t buy that kind of education.”
The Annual Advertising Auction will begin at 2 p.m. online at www.fountaincityauction.com and will last approximately five hours. The online catalog will be updated daily leading up to the official auction.
You can also visit www.fountaincityauction.com or www.auctionzip.com to email a list of items to advertise or sell.
For additional auction needs or questions, you can call Greg at (865)604-3468 or the Fountain City Auction office at (865)474-9931.
