I guess it gets back to that old adage "there is a price to pay for everything". I, myself, preferred the "factory outlet" set-up because I knew, even if I had to wait, I would be able to buy pretty well anything in the entire product line that I wanted at the 10% discount. With the auction, only a handful of product is available at any given time and there is no guarantee that my bid will secure the product even if it is one I am looking for. Quite frankly, even the owner's club volume of available product and the option of making an offer on them, to me anyway, is just as or even more attractive than the auction.
Alas, I guess that is why cars come in many different colors.
I agree that the “factory outlet” method was better for the customer however it had to be expensive for Axiom. As you point out the volume of product available for auction is low. This indicates to me that Axiom had to fill most FO orders with A-stock and only shipped B-stock if it was actually available. As we can see from the auction site there’s not nearly enough B-stock to fulfill the FO orders Axiom must have been receiving, something I always suspected.
