Timing everything in online garage sales
Today’s lesson in humility is brought to you by Facebook. If you’ve used Facebook, then you’re already well acquainted with its ability to take you down a peg or two.
I experience this kind of ego readjustment every time I see a friend’s post announcing their 12-year-old is a finalist for a Macarthur Genius Grant at the same time my teenager opens a box of mac and cheese in a way that explodes orange cheese dust all over the kitchen floor. But if, after scrolling through your feed, you find you’re still feeling a little too full of yourself, there’s a free opportunity that will have you questioning your sense of taste, your sense of value, and your sanity: the Facebook online garage sale.
Recently I had an entire bedroom set to get rid of. There was nothing wrong with it other than my son had outgrown it about two years and five inches ago. I needed it gone but, because of the pandemic, charities were no longer making donation pickups. An in-person garage sale seemed risky.
And this wasn’t something I could shove under the bed and forget about because, you know, I was trying to sell the bed.
So I turned to the local Facebook online garage sale page, but not without a certain amount of trepidation. I knew from other people’s listings that bad pictures or the wrong price invites mean comments and lots of laugh emojis. I did not want laugh emojis. I took clear pictures, wrote a good description, set a fair price, and hit “post.”
Five minutes later I had a buyer. Five minutes after that I’d turned three more buyers away.
If it had been that easy to get rid of an entire bedroom set, I wondered how many other things I’d been holding onto that were potential goldmines. I felt amazingly energized about decluttering our home and began to mentally put a price tag on things that had outlived their usefulness. That’s when my husband suddenly felt amazingly nervous and began vacuuming for the first time in years.
While I was filled with smug selfsatisfaction, I ordered two new pre-lit artificial Christmas trees. I already had two pre-lit artificial Christmas trees and knew I didn’t have room for four trees, so it was a dangerous move on
my part. I wasn’t worried, though, because I knew I could sell the old ones in no time on Facebook’s online garage sale. After all, it was the weekend before Thanksgiving. What could possibly go wrong?
But in online garage sales, as in life, timing is everything.
The night before the buyer was to pick up the furniture, she said she wouldn’t be able to buy it. I reached out to the other potential buyers, but they didn’t respond. I began to regret those feelings of overconfidence. It was like I was caught in some sort of Greek tragedy and the gods were punishing me for my hubris. I just hoped it would end with me stuck with a garage full of unwanted stuff and not me stabbing my eyes out or having my liver eaten by an eagle for eternity.
To make matters worse, a lot of other people also had the idea that this would be a good time to sell their artificial trees. Every size, shape, condition and price point was available for sale and more were added every time I checked Facebook. With each new listing, my items got pushed farther and farther down the list. Pretty soon you couldn’t see my trees for the forest.
Suddenly I wasn’t as clever as I thought I was. Perhaps my destiny was to have piles of unwanted items forever — each attempt to divest myself of them fated to come close but ultimately fail, like some Sisyphean boulder for the garage sale set.
I told myself it was too soon to panic. All I needed was something to get me out of this mess — like a good deus ex machina.
I relisted the bedroom set and tried to make the Christmas trees more noticeable. Grabbing attention was a losing battle, though, because new listings were popping up by the second, selling everything from garbage bags filled with used clothes to used garbage cans. I wasn’t sure if my posts were getting lost in a garage sale or buried in a landfill. Not even Sophocles could have anticipated that plot twist.
Luckily I finally managed to sell everything without having to appease the gods with a sacrifice. But I did learn to keep my pride in check and tread carefully when it comes to Facebook’s online garage sale. And if I ever see a deus ex machina listed, I’m buying it.