On the modern marketplace

The past three years have brought as many moves, where each time, we gather our possessions, such as they are, and relocate everything to a new life in a different place. But this most recent move to New Haven was special. Unlike previous moves, where we could rely on a friend’s truck, an uncle’s old furniture, or a mother’s superfluous cutlery, this time we would be on our own. Or so we imagined. As it turned out, in place of friends and family, we found ourselves dependent upon the spontaneous kindness, constant unpredictability, and sheer strangeness of ordinary people.

Facebook is funny, because on the one hand, it atrophies our attention, depresses our children and radicalizes our parents, all while making a handful of sociopaths obscenely wealthy enough to savage our shared institutions according to their personal whims; but on the other hand its “marketplace” platform also enables one, without stepping foot in Ikea or clicking around on Amazon, to furnish an entire apartment in a week, acquiring possessions you otherwise never could have afforded or encountered, all while giving your money to regular people and exploring and learning about the new area you now call home.

The Facts

Distance: On Sunday August 17 we rented a Ram 1500 Classic Quad Cab pickup truck, which we would return one week later. When we drove away, the odometer read 42,723 and we returned it at 43,517, meaning we drove 794 miles, which for context is more distance than driving all the way to Detroit, or making a roundtrip to Montreal. The distance to the nearest Ikea from our new apartment: 0.8miles. It’s just down the road, I drove right by it every time I headed to meet someone. Having lived here over three weeks now, I still have not stepped inside of it, and by the end of my first week, I could rattle off the names of more small towns in Connecticut than I ever could in BC.

Cost: Through a combination of Venmo or cash, I spent $1336, spread out across 22 distinct purchases, whereas Breann spent $1224, spread out across 15 purchases, for a grand total of 37 purchases amounting to $2560, which breaks down to an average of about $70 per purchase—all of it spent on Facebook Marketplace.

If you’re especially quick at math, you may have also calculated that my average purchase price was around $60, while Breann’s was about $80. Granted, this may be because Breann bought more “essential” things (table, chairs, carpets) which tend to be more on the expensive side, whereas my own purchasing preferences strayed more towards unique bookends, a whiteboard, or a painted porcelain owl that reminded me of the kind of knick-knacks that once crowded the cabinet shelves in my late great Auntie Bee’s cabin.

But my purchases weren’t always cheaper to begin with. Invariably, however, I bargained towards a lower price, talking people down $20 here or $50 there, in part because of the story I told them about myself and about why I wanted—needed—whatever it was they were selling; a story that was always true, by the way, and that, I believe, made them want to sell their thing to me.

If this sounds strange to you, it may be because you hold the mistaken assumption that the patterns of Facebook Marketplace operate according to the capitalist imperatives that govern the so-called free market. But you’d be wrong, as economists usually are. And it is this explanation—that I tried to appeal to something in the seller beyond their profit motive by showing them that, for me, their perhaps once cherished possession is more than just a commodity—this is the reason for my lower price point that I chose to believe, my truth.    

Time: During this week-long period, accumulating furniture on Facebook was our primary preoccupation: we opened the app as soon as we woke up, and it was the last thing we did before bed. Most days, I left the apartment before breakfast, and finally parked the truck well after dark. For the first couple days, I steered the big truck with all the temerity and cautiousness that lethal ton of speeding steel demanded from me. But about midway through the fourth day, something just clicked, and I found myself entering a space I hadn’t occupied since my summers spent working on JP Ranch, when during haying season I drove the silage truck for 8 hours a day, week after week, and where eventually my posterior parietal cortex, the part of my brain responsible for establishing and navigating my position in space, gradually extends beyond the confines of my physical body and expands to encompass the contours of the front and back bumpers. All of a sudden I was one with the Ram.

When confronted with a parking spot that just yesterday I would have passed up as “too tight,” I was now quickly reversing into it, one arm slung casually along the open window, one finger of the other hand twirling the wheel. My Canadian trait to try and treat others with compassion and care whenever driving a car began to give way to a newfound American automotive aggressiveness, and I assertively switched lanes with all the willfulness that lethal ton of speeding steel granted to me.  My upright and tense posture transformed into something else entirely, and I now sat upon the driver’s seat much like the protagonist of a Clint Eastwood movie sits on his favourite stool in the back of the saloon: body coiled, yet comfortable; relaxed and reposed, yet alert and prepared at any moment for action and even the threat of violence.

Result: Our apartment went from completely empty, lacking even an ice cube tray or a shower curtain, to looking quirky and lived-in within the span of a week. Each morning, we would slip into the depths of unorganized chaos that is Facebook Marketplace, and through divinations and creative acts of appropriation, we would reemerge by the evening with the perfect Persian rug with touches of teal to accent our turquoise L-shaped couch; or where in the morning there was only a bare corner in the loft that I envisioned as a reading nook, in the evening I had filled it with a Morris chair, so like the one I had been so sad to leave in Kimberley, with broad, flat wooden armrests, upon which a coffee cup is easily placed (see accompanying photos). Like God creating the world out of disordered nothingness in one week, each day we looked upon the acts of our creation, and where before there had been nothing, now there were things, which made possible new ways of living, and we saw that it was good.   

The Funny

When we were less than three weeks away from moving to New Haven, we still didn’t know how we would get there. Would we fly or would we drive? If the former, would we then ship our stuff? If the latter, which vehicle should we take, or would we drive a U-Haul across the country? Could we live in New Haven without a vehicle? Harvey and Ashlin thought “no,” but Travis and Levi thought “yes,” and although I cannot recall either of their specific arguments, I remember that they were both compelling, and so it seemed that whoever we happened to speak with last would end up deciding this matter for us.

Of course, if we drove, we could take more of our shit. But one of the benefits of moving so often is the chance to actually get rid of shit, the kind of shit that otherwise just slowly accumulates in basements and garages; precisely the kind of shit, I realized, that people would be selling on Facebook; the kind of shit that, if we rented a truck for the first week, we could drive around and collect, fill our apartment with, and in no time at all be surrounded by shit again! And so we decided to fly.

This meant we could only bring the most sentimental of our shit. For me, this was my wooden tennis racket mirror, which I wrapped in bubble sheet and brought on the plane, and for Bre it was her favourite plant, nicknamed Georgia, which she also brought on the plane. Some other shit, we packed up in boxes and sent by mail. For me, this was three 50lbs boxes of books, and for Bre it was 7 boxes of plants. And then we also paid a shipping company to box some of our other shit into a big container, weigh it (it came to 1028lbs of shit), drive it across the country, and leave it on our front steps two weeks later. For me this included more books. For Bre this included a standing desk, computer monitor, bar stools, a lamp, and a tumbleweed from Deep Springs that she plans to turn into a another neat light fixture. But as for the rest of the shit we would need, we would have to spend hours scrolling through other peoples’ shit to get it.

About three weeks before we were due to arrive, I changed my location and started to peruse New Haven’s Facebook Marketplace. What I found outstripped my wildest dreams of opulence: people were just giving away genuine luxury items. The most extravagant example of this was a man advertising a French Heritage Designer Bookcase, who claimed “I payed [sic] over $5k for it but, unfortunately, my wife’s taste has changed.” He’d initially tried to sell it for $500, but now he was giving it away for free. This was just one instance among many. I had to stop searching because it was stressing me out—I felt like we were missing all the good deals. And who’s going to hold something for three weeks, anyways? I logged off.  But nine days out, I logged back on, started finding things, and sending deposits.

If you’ve used Facebook Marketplace before, perhaps you’ve been burned in some way. Maybe, like our friend Molly, you made a substantial deposit on a set of patio furniture, only to show up to the pickup spot and find an empty parking lot. Maybe, like Breann, you sent a $75 deposit for a $150 couch, only to have the seller say it hadn’t gone through, and could you please send some more. If something like this has happened to you, it’s possible you’ve become guarded, more wary in your hard-won wisdom.

For instance Molly, as she’ll herself admit, went to a dark place, and took it upon herself to not only report the con-person who duped her, but to also scour Facebook Marketplace for other posts that used the same tell-tale jargon, allowing her to identify the same person behind the ploy, at which point she would then play with them, and attempt to entrap them, waste their time, and eventually humiliate them, and thus regain some measure of the dignity they had robbed from her along with the non-existent glass-top picnic table and cushioned chairs.

But I have yet to be burned, and so I buy boldly. I delusionally pride myself in being able to get an accurate read on a person, and then I faithfully transfer the funds, often for the full amount. And so before a border guard had even decided if they were going to deign to grant me entrance into the country or arbitrarily detain and deport me, I had already sent money out for six different items in or around New Haven.

Three of these items were bookends. Given we did not yet have a bed, or a table, you may think this was foolish and irresponsible. Breann certainly did. But I knew we would easily find a bed, eventually. I also knew I’d never seen bookends like this (and I’ve seen a lot), such as the praying hands bookends carved from solid blocks of wood, which, as I told the seller, would be perfect for holding my Bibles and works of biblical exegesis; or the porcelain burger bookends, between which I could store my more trashy fast fiction. I couldn’t risk losing these unique pieces, all for fearing to be swindled out of a bit of money. And as I gaze at them now, I’m filled with vindication.

The truth is, not only does it feel good to trust a stranger, but it also feels good to be trusted by a stranger. If somebody on Facebook Marketplace suddenly says to you, “Ok, you sound like a good person, and I trust you, so I’m willing to send the payment now,” it’s not just the promise of convenience that makes you choose this person (especially if they’re asking you to hold it for a week longer than others), rather it’s the confidence in your character that touches something in your soul, and which stirs within you the desire to show yourself worthy of that trust. It’s a lot like when you’re first dating, I think.

At the outset of relationship, some will tell you, you’ve got to be wary: keep your guard up, don’t give too much of yourself too early, or you’ll be burned. According to this prominent view, relationships are a power struggle, and whoever cares less (or at least pretends to) holds more power. And so you can’t always immediately text back after they’ve left you on read all day; it can’t always be you initiating contact and making plans; don’t be a sucker! I always approached dating differently, and chose to go all in. Instead of hedging my bets, I show my cards: I text back immediately; I make evident I’m willing to clear my schedule for them; I put all the power in their hands and place myself in the sucker position. Granted, with this approach, one risks getting burned. Once the other person holds the power, they can play you like a fool. But more often than not, I felt like making myself vulnerable elicited from them a reciprocation in kind: having been shown trust, they wanted to show themselves to be trustworthy; seeing that I was throwing out what were supposed to be the rules of the game, they too now wanted to dispense with them.[1] It is my belief that this often brought out a different side of the person, and we both got to proceed to bringing our full selves to our early interactions. (And, contrarily, if they decided to play me, at least I got to figure out fast what kind of person they were when suddenly all the power was placed in their hands). Proceed prudently, with walls of protection guarding your heart, and you risk losing your chance at love, and all to avoid a bit of heartbreak. Basically, buying things on Facebook is a bit like falling in love: it demands a leap of faith, and the hope that the other will catch you.

This is the only way I can explain the kindness shown to me by strangers, once I showed them I was willing to trust them. Like the guy who got up and out of his house at 9:30pm to drive fifteen minutes to meet me at McDonalds along the freeway so that I wouldn’t have to go too far out of my way to pick up his $30 monitor. (Unfortunately, I have yet to get this monitor working, but I think that’s because of me, and not the monitor. But if the problem persists, then I’ll re-evaluate accordingly his reasons for being willing to come meet me and sell me his monitor.) Or the man in a magnificent mansion (located so far out in the secluded forests at the end of a long driveway that I got lost twice on the way there and even lost cell reception), who agreed to sell me his wife’s beautiful ‘Writer’s Desk’ for $50 below asking. “She used to be an executive, so it’s a solid desk,” he informed me. He felt comfortable driving away in his Maserati to leave me alone on his premises, as my getting lost had by then already made him quite late to go pick up his daughter from school. When he learned I’d be at Yale, he said “well I hope you become a doctor with this desk”; when I told him I already was, I promised to instead send him the first thing I wrote at the desk, joking “don’t feel obligated to read past the first paragraph if you don’t like it.” That first thing turns out to be this essay. I wonder if he’s read this far?  

Or the woman selling the praying bookends, who, once she learned how much they meant to me, and how far I was willing to drive to get them (44km), said she could meet me half way in another town later on in the week, since she had errands to run anyways. Or the woman who drove to me, and delivered right to my door the gold crucifix with a lion-clothed Jesus, which now hangs above those praying hands bookends and my Bibles. (I am not religious, but the cross, especially the version with Christ’s slender frame nailed to it, is without a doubt my favourite symbol.) Or the the old woman selling the porcelain owl, who with her coke-bottle glasses resembled an owl herself, and who upon learning that I liked owls because they reminded me of my great Aunt, promised to rummage through her attic for me to find some more, and soon sent me pictures of eleven other similar glass and wood and metal owls. I don’t want any more owls, but I’ll buy a few more, since she went through the trouble.

Or the man with the strong Connecticut accent, who talked at us in this driveway for over 30 minutes in the dark, and from whom we bought two air conditioners. When he asked us if we had the tools to install them into the windows, we answered sheepishly that we did not; our tools were shipped to arrive in two more weeks—we only have plants and tennis racquet mirrors. He said, “no problem, I’ve got an extra screwdriver and some screws I can give you.” It later turned out that one of his sons had put one of the ACs together backwards, and so this man had to answer a barrage of texts from me the next day to explain how to get it setup in the window. He also promised he could get us a good deal on leasing a Nissan Rogue, since in his opinion, living in New Haven without a car is not possible.

Or the couple from whom we bought our new bed, and when I showed up for pickup, instead of having to dismantle it all myself (as was the case with the other bed we bought), they had it all in pieces, professionally wrapped in plastic, which enabled me to easily tetris it all into the back of the truck. They too soon had to answer a barrage of texts, and patiently explain to us how to put the bed together. Or the woman from whom Breann went to get a nice double barreled laundry hamper, but, because she was moving to San Francisco the next morning, ended up filling the entire hamper with plates, glasses, cutlery, baking pans, measuring cups–all for free. Or the woman who sold me a leather messenger bag, and decided to lower the price because she had just noticed it was leaving some marks on her clothes, and so instructed me on how I may need to apply a finish to it, and until then, not wear with a white shirt or out in wet weather. As it turns out, I no longer need that bag at all: less than a week later a package appeared on my steps, from my dear friend Travis, who surprised me with a beautiful brand new leather bag of my own, subtly emblazoned with the words “Dr. Mabey” on the side, which instantly became one of my most prized possessions. Because, while the kindness of strangers is important, the thoughtfulness of friends is essential.

Or the old woman who met me at her door to sell me a whiteboard, but as soon I left, texted me again saying, “I forgot to mention that I sew, and now at home do mending, shortening, clothes etc.” I said perfect, I need the custom book pocket in my jacket enlarged, the last tailor made it too small for anything larger than the slimmest novella. When I came back with my jacket after dinner, this old lady with a limp welcomed me—a big black man—into her living room, to show her the ideal pocket size with an example book. When I again came back to pick up my jacket, I brought Breann along to check out a microwave and some picture frames this woman was selling, and in the course of conversation she let slip that her actual name was not Mary, as listed online, but Maggy. “You can’t be real on Facebook,” she advised us, as we both sat in her living room and chatted about how her friend had once been robbed after meeting someone in the Walmart parking lot. (I guess this is why no less than three sellers chose to meet up in the parking lots of the local police stations.[2]) So much like the dating dynamics described above, although Maggy, the retired secretary-cum-tailor, plays coy on Facebook and protects her real identity under her alter ego Mary, if you show up on her stoop with an honest demeanor and a torn jacket, you’ll find that what she really wants is to invite you into her home, and tell you all about how she met and fell in love with her much younger husband from South Africa, who has been “a great benefit” to her life.    

The Fundamentals

The most important thing you have to understand if you’re perusing Facebook Marketplace and hoping to find a deal is that people are not simply selling objects, but sharing stories. They don’t only want to make money, but also make meaning. Most of these possessions are imbued with significance, often all the more heightened for the seller as it’s about to leave their hands. Whether it’s the woman who wants to tell the story of her ottoman that she’s “deconstructed,” which means removing the upholstery to leave it with an “unfinished look.” She told me she got “far into” such projects through watching YouTube, and that if I wanted to pick things up where she left them that her next step was going to be to apply oven cleaner spray to the wooden legs (or was it baking soda?), and leave it out in the sun all day, which would then wipe off and also remove the finish, giving the underlying wood a “rawer, more organic look.” I told her that, although that did sound nice, I would probably just go ahead and rest my feet on it as it is. (It already complements my aforementioned Morris chair very nicely—see accompanying photos.)

Or the woman selling her bike, which truly appears to be in perfect condition, because, as she demonstrated for me, she would always lug it up the flight of stairs to keep it safe in her apartment. She shared with me all her favourite spots in and around the city along with the best routes to get there. (Because this woman ended up living less than 3 blocks away, the time between me (i) coming across her post and sending her a message, to (ii) lugging the beautiful bike in perfect condition up my own flight of stairs was about 2o minutes total. I mean, suck on that, Amazon Prime!).

More often than not, as the possession is transferred, these people prefer to sell their objects to somebody whose own new story might meaningfully align with their old story. This is something that Breann did not fully appreciate at the outset of our Marketplace mania. When she wasn’t having success getting replies and setting meetups, I asked to look at her messages, and the problem was immediately clear to me. “There’s no emotion here! Where’s the story? You have to give them something to work with, even if it’s just a quick, ‘OMG this X is SO beautiful, it would go perfectly with my Y and it reminds me of my favourite Z, which I lost a year ago! I’m super interested, and I’m willing to give you a deposit right now. I can pick up later whenever is most convenient for you…’”

Potentially confronted with a plethora of “interested” but lackadaisical buyers, this message separates you from the pack, and using that template, I guarantee you a 90% success rate, even in the most competitive of markets. Yes, people want to get rid of their shit quick, but it’s a big bonus if you can give them a reason to also feel good about getting rid of their shit: show them the hole in your soul that will finally be filled by their shit. They’ll give it to you, and feel good about doing it. And so will you. Indeed, after what should have been the end of some of these interactions, I couldn’t help myself but reach out one last time, if only to show Lauryn how well her colourful carpet fit with our colourful couches; or tell Sara how badly her awesome therapist style couch wouldn’t fit up our second flight of stairs, even with the feet off, and so it’s become Breann’s office couch instead of mine. The start of my stories with these possessions is the end of theirs.

As I look around at what truly feels like our wonderfully curated apartment, I wonder now if part of the satisfaction I feel comes from the fact that these second hand objects have already arrived at our apartment somewhat pre-imbued with a story, even if that story is “I drove all the way to Easton to get this desk: I got lost twice on the way there, and on the way back a Jeep swerved into my lane and almost hit me head on—I almost died driving to get this damned desk!”

Yet, these people frequently chose to bring the story of their once beloved possessions to an end for what often sounded like no reason at all. Invariably, when I arrived to pick something up, I’d hear some version of, “Yeah it’s in good condition, but we just decided it was time to get a new one.” And so it is a fundamental truth of Facebook Marketplace that it is able to be a place full of great second-hand stuff because most people are driven to unnecessarily buy new things, in an attempt to fill their own soul-holes, which are no longer made whole by this merely satisfactory bookcase or perfectly adequate table. For these people, who set their tastes based on passing fads and current fashions, the time soon comes to accumulate something new. Although I’m happy to be the lucky beneficiary of this insatiable acquisitive desire, manufactured and magnified by billions of dollars spent annually on marketing this madness into our minds, it’s also unsettling to imagine people getting rid of these classically beautiful, well-made things, to replace them for something… else. For instance, when we showed up to buy the turquoise couch, which also seemed to be in mint condition, the woman selling it said she’d decided she wanted something bigger. Never mind that fact she seemed to weigh all of 125lbs, and that the couch she was currently getting rid of hardly fit into her small space as it was—this petite woman with the cramped quarters looked at her couch situation, and she dreamed to go bigger!  

When I look upon the sea of supremely suitable objects on Facebook Marketplace, I imagine the corresponding ocean of shit being sold on Amazon and Ikea, which has washed in like a tidal wave, displacing in its wake all that I see before me.

It’s not often I’ll wax poetic about technology and our online lives, but I will say that this whole week-long experience did get me feeling sentimental. This wasn’t your grandfather’s yard sale, found by scouring the classified ads in the back of the newspaper, then making your way there with an unfolded map spread over the passenger seat. This was all made possible by big tech, which allowed me to shoot off a bunch of instant messages five minutes before I entered a new town (that I’d be leaving fifteen minutes later), collect some quick deals, and then make my way home through unfamiliar roads, with minute-by-minute traffic updates given by the obsequious robotic voice, my (almost) constant companion, patiently giving directions from the phone.

It must also be said that Facebook Marketplace fundamentally gamifies the whole experience of purchasing secondhand goods: it makes you feel as if you are using your wits to track down and secure the goods. And every time I opened my phone, there’d be a bunch of new bright red little notification bubbles, basically saying: ‘look at the shit someone just posted in your area, don’t let somebody else get it first!’ If the object is within a couple miles from where you’re currently located, the app will place a small icon of a walking person next to the post, as if to say: ‘look, this could be you, walking to get this shit right now!’ At some point late in the week, while I was driving over an hour to pick up the only desk chair that apparently suited my stringent requirements for desk chairs[3], I found myself wondering: am I actually finding good deals on great products in tucked-away towns and diligently getting to it before it gets scooped up by someone else, or am I just slowly losing my mind and wasting my time?

Possibly, in some cases we did waste a little money and some of our time. Admittedly, I did only very narrowly avoid getting crashed into by distracted drivers, and I did almost struck a kid on a bike, who darted through a red light, and whose saucer-sized eyes, when we made eye contact over the top of the truck’s hood once it came to a screeching halt, told me that he was both very sorry and very thankful. It is also likely that our shoulders and backs were a little more sore than they would have been otherwise. And frankly, we were very concerned, for the space of one morning, that we must have bought an infested mattress or couch, when we woke up with what we feared might be bed bug bites, but what the internet assures us was just a random spider. (These nocturnal bites have yet to reoccur.) Finally, perhaps there’s already a couple ugly scratches along the wall, from when we tried to squeeze that big yellow therapist couch through the twist at the top of the stairs, and now I suppose we’ll have to do some painting, before the landlord decides to keep any of that two-months-rent security deposit he demanded from us (something, by the way, that’s illegal in BC, but that I’m sure is all above board in the land of the free and the home of the debtor), and which, on top of the actual first month’s rent, and along with all the Facebook purchases that I’ve been writing about in this essay, have conspired together to deplete my American bank account to its current balance of $186.70. To all of this, I say so be it!

In the process, I met some nice people, who helped me in their own ways, and invited me into their homes and into their stories. In those moments, I felt like I was finding and recapturing that early vision of what Facebook was supposed to have been and made possible: a free platform for regular people to be empowered to instantaneously coordinate their lives and interests to their mutual benefit. It’s a version of Facebook that we now feel has been taken from us by our rapacious tech overlords. And indeed it has. But we also played a role in giving it over to them. And we continue to erode what’s left to claim or regain of an ethical online life, when each time we choose the convenient click and quick dopamine rush of buying something shiny and new from a big corporation, instead of giving our money to the nice retired lady who walks with a limp and sells and sews to make ends meet; when in search of the supposedly short-term advantage of having the object placed on our porch by tomorrow morning, we thereby disempower the adults running around wearing diapers inside of windowless warehouses, and we fail to find on Facebook the nice lady with coke-bottle spectacles, who is willing to rummage through her attic so that you might feel closer to your dead Aunt. Take it from me: with just a couple clicks and some extra messages, she’ll leave whatever it is you’re looking for outside on her porch, and you can collect it later that same evening. If you’re nice to her, maybe she’ll even invite you inside and mend your clothes.  

---

[1] A few years ago, when I was explaining what I took to be my quixotic approach to modern dating, the person I was speaking with informed me that what I had just described sounded suspiciously close to “love bombing,” which is considered to be a manipulative and toxic tactic. For now, I’ll leave that thread unpulled, as indeed I have ever since this disturbing interpretation was first brought to my attention.

[2] And yes, these three were all Caucasian

[3] Because I know you’re now wondering, ‘what are Kieran’s requirements for a desk chair?’, here they are: (i) I didn’t want it to be black and/or grey; (ii) I didn’t want it to be plastic and/or faux leather; and (iii) I didn’t want it to have cushions that looked like the Michelin Man’s body. If you are trying to imagine the chair as I list these disqualifying features, you’ll see in your mind that I’ve described most office chairs. Maybe you’re even sitting in one of these monstrosities right now, god help you. If you can envision what is left in the negative space remaining, I wanted something with a nice velvet and/or textured fabric, something made with wood and/or metal, and something that looked like it was made of just two or three pieces put together, instead of twelve different parts. And I found exactly what I wanted: Paul was selling it in Rocky Hill, just 46km away, for $20, because he’d decided to buy a new desk chair, probably something along the lines of my first description.