My Craigslist bitch: I was selling a 1989 Chrysler Town And Country minivan, still in pretty good shape but with 160,000 miles. I listed it for $3500 and nobody called or emailed. After a month, I dropped it to $2500. The first email I got after the price drop asked me what was wrong with the van since I listed it so low :smack:
Just ignore it. It’s not worth your time to respond. He’s just going to move on to some other mark. You learn pretty quickly to filter out the scammers. Not referring to the thing you’re selling by name is a huge giveaway.
I don’t mind the low-ballers. At least they’re making an offer. I can counter, and we can go from there. The “how low will you go” people are just annoying. I’m not going to negotiate against myself, dude. It makes me want to send them a “basic negotiating concepts” document.
Yup. I’ve bought and sold quite a few things on craigslist and the level of basic literacy, common sense and manners is generally low. That might be location-specific - I live just north of Flint Michigan and use the Flint CL mostly - the Ann Arbor one seems to be populated by a slightly more evolved type of human.
My somewhat unrelated but not-quite CL bitch:
I have a very large dead tree that needs to be taken down. Figured I’d turn to CL services first. I called four recent posters who said they were experienced, licensed and insured.
One had “a voice mailbox that had not been set up yet.”
Two were numbers that were “disconnected and no longer in service.” (All the folks I called had posted within the last week or two.)
The last one I called, the guy who answered told me I had a wrong number. I double-checked and compared the number I’d called with the one in the ad: I called the number listed.
That was four out of four, as doG is my witness. Fuck craigslist “skilled services.”
FWIW, I bought my current motorcycle from a guy on CL. (A full-dress touring bike.) Paid him almost all he was asking but got him to split the cost of a checkout at the dealer and to throw in a helmet. I’m satisfied with the deal and I think he is too.
This could merely have been stupidity on the part of the advertiser.
As a general rule, I have had pretty good luck on Craigslist. Perhaps the experience varies by region.
Always make the rules for the deal clear such as “cash only, will not hold, will not drop the price any lower…” That gives me an excuse for blowing off the lame responses.
I mainly use Craigslist for advertising garage sales, stuff worth more than $10 or when I am looking for someone to plow my driveway. I list curb alerts for perennials and often get offered other plants in exchange.
This is reminiscent of my experiences trying to get yard/tree work done - never anyone home, crudely programmed answering machines with no callbacks etc. Occasionally I’d get through to the number listed for, say, Triple A Tree Services only to have a quavery voice answer (barely audible over the TV blasting in the background) “hello?”.
But these weren’t Craigslist postings - they were newspaper and even Yellow Pages ads.
A lot of people who run small businesses are totally disorganized and/or have no clue on how to present themselves in a professional manner.