The hard sell
ELEANOR ROBERTSON HAS SOME GRIPES WITH HAWKING THINGS ONLINE.
A common story about the origin of money – which you might be familiar with if you had a friend in high school who took commerce and wouldn't shut up about it – is that we invented it to get away from bartering. Bartering is swapping one thing for another, like trading a cow for a toilet, and it requires a double coincidence: you have to find someone who wants to get rid of their cow, and that person has to find you, the weirdo with the surplus toilet.
Money is said to have come along in order to make getting rid of your extra toilet easier – now you just have to find someone with money, rather than searching high and low for the cow-having toilet-wanter. In the story, money makes everything more rational and convenient. Here we are, self-interested agents, using our big, juicy brains to facilitate smooth and simple trading via the marketplace.
Lots of people object to this story, often because there's not much evidence to support it having actually happened. But my objection is simpler, and drawn from personal experience: I have, on occasion, bought and sold household objects via sites like Gumtree and Facebook. And rather than representing an idealised vision of two evolved humans coming together in a mutually beneficial detente, these transactions are some of the most off-the-planet, wild interactions I've ever had with others. Take the time I tried to offload a gently used LCD television. I whacked it up online with a price of $200 – a reasonable sum, I thought, based on what identical used TVS were going for. Within five minutes, I had dozens of messages. One asked me whether I was selling any "filthy used underwear". A few offered me well below the asking price, including a person who said, "I'll give you 50 bucks for it and I will also include some homemade tomato sauce." I considered that for a moment – who doesn't love homemade tomato sauce – but I had to turn the offer down after having intense mental visions of some guy stirring a bathtub full of rotten tomatoes around with a garden rake.
Once, a friend of mine rode his motorbike to some guy's place to pick up a set of speakers. When he got there, everything went smoothly, except for the loud and explicit anime porn that was playing on the guy's computer, in the middle of his lounge room.
A few years before that, my housemate and I drove over to a family home to pick up a secondhand vacuum cleaner, and found the vacuum sitting in the middle of a large backyard full of chickens. "Just go and pick it up. The chickens will not hurt you," said the old lady selling the vacuum. She was right – they didn't hurt us. But the feeling of dozens of beady little eyes on us as we inched through the morass of chook flesh was far from the smooth, sane process those year 11 commerce textbooks had led me to expect.
Part of the problem must be that these small-time buying-selling relationships start online, often on social media (or as I like to call it, The Dickhead Factory). Even though the exchange of physical objects requires the process to culminate in an in-person meeting, it's still bound by the iron rule – Nothing Good Ever Happens On Facebook. How can you peacefully trade a whipper snipper right next to people selling "teddy bear made of ham" and "7yo German Shepherd, does not bite except when startled, not safe with children"?
Despite this, I am currently trying to buy a set of used dining chairs on Gumtree. I know that, in all probability, I will end up trying to wrestle the chairs from the jaws of a live shark. What can I say? I just love a bargain.