Distributing the Wealth with the Craigslist Free Section


I will have to admit that I love Craigslist, and I have used it well both for buying and selling things. We have only purchased one item via it (my son's Wii which was a great deal!), but have sold and just plain given away a lot of items using it. The most intriguing section for me is the "free" section which he have used primarily to get rid of unnecessary things. It is amazing how you can post an item for $20 and nobody will want it, but if you post it for free you will immediately get 15 respondents in a few minutes. In the past two weeks we have used Craigslist to get rid of our old lawn mower which had worked but was damaged when a part fell off and the blade sliced into it (ouch!), and also my son's old bike which he actually outgrew a couple years ago. In both cases I just e-mailed the person interested and told them to pick up the item in the front of our house where we left them. So I never actually met the people who received our lovely, former possessions!

The same is not true about the people who received our old refrigerator, stove, washer and dryer (all of which came with our house when we bought it.) In those cases I had to help them get it out of our house and into their truck or trailer, but they were all very pleasant people who were thankful to receive our free stuff. In the case of the stove, they actually arrived just for the refrigerator, but when I told them we were getting rid of the giant 50 year old electric stove, they were willing to take that too! We didn't think anybody would want that thing, even free!

Living where we now live in a somewhat pricey mid-county St. Louis suburb, I wonder what these people think about us giving away our stuff via Craigslist. Do they think we are generous, caring people, or affluent, wasteful fools? In any case, Craigslist has become a high tech and efficient means of transferring resources from those people who have things they do not need to the people who may need them. It is much easier than scanning the "Bargain Box" in the newspaper, and the response time is incredibly fast. Often when I post something in the free section, I will start getting responses within minutes of it becoming live. For the lawn mower posting I had to take it down in less than half an hour or so because I already had over a dozen responses by then. Is there that much demand for a 12 year old damaged lawn mower in this society? I spelled out what was wrong with the mower (bent blade, damaged deck, self propel mechanism gets stuck, poor mulching) and yet lots of people still wanted it. It is frightening!

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