Worth The Money

When I was expanding my memorabilia collection a few years ago I was very active on the auction site eBay. However, I quickly fell out of love with it and haven't used in years. There were a couple of reasons for this: first off, I didn't like that there wasn't an actual corporation behind the products. As annoying as it may be to fight a large company when there is an issue with some item you recently purchased, at least you have someone you can take it up with. While there are certainly legitimate businesses which run through eBay, there are also a lot of people simply looking to offload random crap they found in their basement and others whose only intent is to rip strangers off through the internet. If you have a problem with those people you may as well be talking to yourself. Secondly, I worried that half the time I was getting out-bid by the very people selling the products in an attempt to raise the price of the winning bid. It never failed that if I was about to get a signed jersey for below what it was worth, the price would jump just before the auction closed. Now, that could easily be other legitimate bidders, but it could also be the seller looking to make as much money as possible. That uncertainty never sat well with me and I suspect many other people felt the same way. That is why I was not surprised to see a site like QuiBids come along, which is similar to eBay except it requires you to pay a fee for every bid. This policy may cost you a few dollars more, but it weeds out a lot of people who only want to mess with other people's auctions and waste other people's time.

Working off this premise, there are several other websites I would like to see adopt a similar policy. Just a small fee so you can eliminate some of the people who simply aren't worth your time. One of the first websites that could use this is Craig's List. Before my parents built their house in the late 80s that plot of land was a quarry. As such there were two large granite curbstones guarding the driveway to keep people out. Even after the land was sold the curbstones remained off to the side of the driveway. For years my father had plans to turn them into a bench or some kind of decoration, but that never happened. At this point he just wants them out of the yard. So, I took to Craig's List, hoping someone would be interested in them. I had an idea of how much these curbstones should cost if they were new but since they had been sitting outside for 25 years, I left the price section blank. The ad told people to make an offer with the only caveat being they would have to come and pick the curbstones up themselves, which would be taken into consideration when contemplating about the offer. I thought it seemed like an okay deal, fair to both sides and hoped to have them out of the yard fairly quickly. Apparently, my hopes were too high for a free site.

We were told that these curbstones were worth about $10 a foot. So, when the first email came in offering far less than what they were worth, even when taking into account that he was willing to pick them up, I told the guy thanks, but no. As it turned out, that offer would be the best one I would get all week. Every subsequent offer was lower, as people either thought I didn't know how much they were worth or expected me to be so desperate to get rid of them that I was willing to take below market value. But, the real kicker was the email I got this morning from a man who wanted to tell me that the curbstones weren't worth anything and they would be such a pain to move that I shouldn't expect anyone to offer me money. However, out of the pure kindness of his heart, the guy was willing to take them away for free as soon as possible. Of course he was. Who doesn't expect random strangers on the internet to do favors for people they have never met? All that message did was confirm to me that these curbstones have to be worth something, otherwise this guy wouldn't be trying to get them for free. And if they were really worthless he wouldn't be in such a hurry to relieve me of them. It probably won't shock you to learn that I didn't bother returning that guy's email.

It's messages like that which drive me crazy about Craig's List. It also does not help that in previous attempt to sell something through the site I have gotten crazy amounts of spam mail in addition to the annoying emails. Now, despite those emails I have had several successful sales through the site (even if they did feel like drug deals as they were occurring), so I am not looking for Craig's List to be completely re-tooled. Also, I am aware that it is free to post the ad and as such I am getting what I pay for. Lastly, I'm not sure what other sites I could use to sell an item like this, so they kind of have me in a bind. However, if in the future they asked me for a small fee to post my ad and in exchange the people had to pay an ever smaller fee to email me that would be fine with me. I would gladly do that as it would pretty much be guaranteed to eliminate the spam mailers (who are as cheap as they are annoying) as well as the people who are clogging my email with offers we both know are way too low. After all, if I wanted to give these things away they would be under the "free stuff" category the site already has. At this point if the offers don't improve I will probably take the ad down and see if I can find someone who will make the slabs into something decorative. Maybe I'll look into what kind of project a stone mason could come up with for these things. I wonder if they have a listing on Craig's List?