Pricks Of The Trade

It used to be that on Craigslist you could put up an ad, and you’d get a fair number of serious buyers, with the occasional unreliable person or spammer thrown in. However, the tables seem to have turned.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to unload our second TV on Craigslist, along with a glass-doored stand. The set was just a few years old and in excellent condition, so I set what I figured was a reasonable price. Every now and then I would get replies, but those turned out to be mostly email harvesters. As time went by and I reposted the items, I dropped the price a bit. Rinse, repeat.

Since we needed the space more than we needed another TV set sitting around, I was willing to knock the price down below what I personally thought was fair for the unit and a nice stand. Finally I had hit the fiscal jugular of the locals browsing the site – the emails started coming in. This time, it seemed, they were from real people, too.

Several interested individuals set up times to come pick the items up, but never showed. None of them offered any explanation, not that I demanded any after the fact, but it certainly would have been nice. The only person to make the effort to even tell me he wasn’t coming after all simply sent an email half an hour before pick-up time and said he “couldn’t” buy it after all. Not that I needed detailed explanations, but if people found better deals or something, it’s always good to know so that I can set the price more competitively.

One guy sent me one-line messages directly from his cell phone into my email. He asked if the television set was digital-ready, because if it was, he wanted to buy it. I told him it was not, and thought I’d never hear from him again. Yet to my surprise, he sent many more messages, most of which could be best described as sentence fragments. If these hadn’t been coming from a cell, I’d have assumed this was some sort of a scam about to unfold. Something about the way this guy communicated was quite unusual compared to the other “buyers.” In fact, I joked in an Internet chat half an hour before he was due to pick the TV up that if I turned up dead in the news, they should tell the bewildered cops to check my email for clues.

Two huge guys of an African-American descent showed up in an SUV. I showed them that the set worked, and so on and so forth, and one of them proceeded to hand over a wad of cash, while the other one lifted the almost 100-pound set effortlessly up and walked out. After all those disappointing no-shows, it was nice to have someone just come over, verify the item’s condition, fork over the agreed-upon amount of green without last minute renegotiations, take the item, and pull out of the driveway.

Moreover, these guys were genuinely nice.

I asked the guy with the dough if he had a digital converter box (since he had asked whether the TV had digital capability) but he shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’ve been looking online but they’re like 50 bucks.” So pleased was I to finally be dealing with somebody with a backbone that I grabbed an unopened box with a converter in it and handed it over for free. I had gotten two of them with the coupon program, seeing as we had two TVs, but now I only really needed just the one we were already using. The thought of trying to sell the extra converter seemed unethical to me, and besides this was an opportunity to help someone out at a time when people ought to be helping one another.

His eyes just lit up and he shook my hand. It was nice to be able to inject an uplifting moment like that into the day.

Tagged as: Craigslist