She immediately got a woman who posted saying she was interested but who said she didn't get paid until Friday or whatever. And I must admit that I was truly shocked. I was just like, "who the hell doesn't have 20 bucks??" I was genuinely confused. I've honestly never been in that type of situation myself, so it's so odd to me to realize how many people truly do live paycheck to paycheck. I just couldn't believe that this woman couldn't scrape together 20 bucks for an entire living room set.
Yeah its wild. Although I do understand not even having an extra $20 (been there before as a broke student), I certainly wasn't trying to buy random stuff while in that condition. Certainly not stuff that wasn't absolutely essential.
if you don't even have 20 bucks to your name why are earth are you looking to buy furniture and TV trays?!
This woman did say something about her just moving there and pretty much having no furniture yet, but I mean, $20 to get you furniture for your whole living room is pretty good. Maybe she was only looking on the yard sale page hoping for free stuff? Maybe people use the "I don't get paid till Friday" technique in hopes that the seller will just tell them that they can have the item for free? Or, I suppose it truly is just much more likely that they honestly are living paycheck to paycheck and just don't have the money right now.
It really does depend on the person. I downsized last year and was selling a bunch of furniture. One woman was interested in a bed frame/headboard set I had, and seriously lowballed me, b/c she didn't have any more money. I just wanted to get the stuff out of the house, so I agreed, on the condition that she show up the same day.
She agreed, and I was surprised to see that she was planning a 90 minute drive one way. That's a lot of fuel for a pickup truck! A few hours later, she showed up w/her parents in tow, and the fun began. None of them were physically fit enough to dismantle the simple set, they had no tools or even blankets with them to protect their purchase, and the back of the pickup had a bunch of shattered glass in it! Talk about being unprepared...
Anyhow, they loved my house, and proceeded to walk through several rooms, exclaiming that they wanted this or that. I hadn't planned on selling a lot of the stuff, but I had no attachment to any of it, so we negotiated on each piece, and they literally took stuff off the wall once they handed over the cash, all the while talking about how they needed to save some of their cash to buy gas to get back home!
In the end, I sold a lot of little crap and they handed over 5x the original asking price of the bed frame, along with the desire to come back w/more money to buy more stuff. They never called back, and I never expected them to. But they clearly were lying about how much money they had in their pocket.