Having just moved (again), I've spent the past two weeks browsing Craigslist in a concerted effort to furnish my entire apartment for no money, and this is my question: Does anyone actually buy stuff from Craigslist for more than $100, give or take?
My mentality--and I assume that of most other people my age--when furnishing a place through Craigslist is that the whole setup will be temporary, hence my disinclination to purchase "real" (read: expensive, solid) furniture and my resorting to Craigslist in the first place. I want to buy the cheapest, lightest, easiest-to-transport version of the thing I'm looking for--$25 collapsible bookshelves, $20 laminate desks, etc. The goal is to furnish on the cheap, then re-sell for even cheaper when I move out, and repeat the process in the new place (until at some point in the extremely distant future, I finally settle down somewhere for good, and the first thing I will do then is have a bed built out of living trees so it can never be moved again). By buying cheap and selling slightly cheaper instead of buying at retail and selling for way less to compete with the even cheaper resold stuff on Craigslist, I lose the least amount of money in the process of moving.
So, when I'm browsing the options on Craigslist and come across such things as $300 solid oak dressers or $700 mahogany dining room sets, I ignore them entirely even though 1) the discount on these items is substantially bigger than the discount on the recycled Target and Ikea junk I actually buy, and 2) they're obviously way better quality. The reason I don't buy a $300 dresser is pretty obvious, but I do note that this dresser probably cost over $600 originally, whereas the ubiquitous Ikea "Malm" dresser made of pressed sawdust and cardboard(!) that I buy instead for $60 only cost $100 originally and is, obviously, a piece of crap. The solid oak dresser is by far the thriftier buy, if thrift is taken to mean quality+price and not just pennies saved.
So I wonder, what becomes of the $300 solid oak dressers when everyone my age adopts my version of home economics? I assume that old rich people are still buying new, expensive, solid furniture, so there remains a market for producing it. But I doubt they're buying it on Craigslist for $300, because people who think in terms of solid oak probably don't overlap much with people who think in terms of Craigslist and driving around town sticking mismatched used things in the backs of their Toyotas. As a result, the people who would otherwise buy expensive furniture with the thought of reselling at a reasonable discount later are doomed in their efforts, and thus is the market for cheap crap from Ikea enlarged. And for places like Target and Ikea, which are in effect competing with Craigslist for the same cheapo furniture buyers, does this pressure drive down their quality even farther so that they can beat the $25 resale price tag on their own merchandise?
Basically, what I'm asking is: will my cheapness result in a massive furniture apocalypse in which the Malm dressers and custom-made, hand-crafted teak dressers are the only two options left?
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8 comments:
well, as a 59 yo with a stable job, I am the market for the good stuff, and I look at Craigslist. And I can go pick up with my ten-year-old minivan with the back seats out, left over from selling off my clunker and getting a shiny new van. So I challenge your assumptions. dave.s.
The answer to the question "who buys $500 furniture on Craigslist?" is "young attorneys," in my experience.
Once you've got enough crap that tossing everything and buying anew is no longer a workable moving strategy, the 50% discounted solid wood stuff looks like a much better deal.
My uncle is hunting on Craigslist all the time to find nice stuff for good deals. And they don't own anything from Ikea or Target (I think).
I would have thought expensive stuff on Craigslist would be a bit like getting the $17 fish dish at a diner where everything else is under $10 - you're getting a better value (fish being less marked-up in restaurants generally than bread, pasta), but still, with the $17, you might want to look elsewhere. But! The $17 fish is not (one hopes) discounted. So maybe the better analogy would be vintage shopping for clothes - often these shops sell a mix of H&M stuff for the same as or more than the original cost, as well as more expensive but more drastically marked down designer goods. My sense is that the market for both the used-designer clothes and the $500 dressers (to hold those clothes!) would be the frugal upper middle classes, 30 and up.
I sold exercise equipment on craigslist for $150 or so once. But furniture? Nah.
Well, I'm glad to know that someone is buying the solid oak. I wonder though--do all these people have trucks? Is there overlap b/w truck-owners and upmarket craigslist buyers?
Well, when I turned in my 1991 F150 under the Cash for Clunkers program (thank you Tax Payers of America - most of you make less than I do, so your sacrifice is truly heroic - for my nice new Toyota mini-van) I kept my old van and took the seats out. So it's sort of like a truck. And, in addition, if I ever need to move something huge, Zipcar has trucks. dave.s.
Once you've got enough crap that tossing everything and buying anew is no longer a workable moving strategy, the 50% discounted solid wood stuff looks like a much better deal.
Correct, although I'd specify that you'd need to be young attorneys who are likely to stay in the same city (and possibly the same apartment/house) for a while. We're constantly debating moving, so it never seems to make sense to buy nicer-than-Target furniture (and anyway our place came furnished except for bookshelves and other storage units; previous owner didn't seem to own any books except one of New York cartoons).
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