Craigslist Rules

For those of you not familiar with it (where have you been hiding?!), Craigslist is a very basic-looking online classified website with local version in most major metropolitan areas of the country, Seattle included. Among things you could list/find there are jobs, housing, personals, and things for sale, not to mention adult stuff, and community stuff. Since I moved out here, I've used it mainly for finding roommates and housing, but I also found my current job on there, and have recently sold a few items. The thing that makes Craigslist work is that people know to go there, and the high traffic leads to an unusually high match rate for someone you're looking for (at least in my case). In many ways, it's a perfect exercise in capitalism.

Some people wonder how they got by without cell phones, or the internet, but in a smaller sense, I wonder how I'd solve some of my problems if Craigslist weren't around. In the last two weeks alone, I've found a buyer for my used laptop ($350.00 for a vintage 2002!), a new roommate, and also multiple plumbers for a slow drain that I have. In each case, I went into it worried that I was asking for too much (or offering too little, in the case of the plumber), but the result was that I got just the right number of replies (meaning I priced things correctly). Had I chosen an alternative route (not eBay, since I've been banned from there), I wouldn't have made out nearly as well. In essence, CL is like an odd mix of eBay and Priceline, where, even if you want a service done for you, you could still set a price and see who comes calling. Chances are, someone will.

Craigslist isn't perfect, of course. There's no quality control on the people that get in touch with you, and so there's the added risk that you might be wasting your time waiting for a buyer to come look at the item you have for sale, or maybe you get a bad plumber. I've experienced this for sure -- most of the time just trying to give away stuff for free, in fact. But the pros overwhelming outweigh the cons, and the result is that I could take care of things in a much more streamlined fashion, and it works out better financially to boot.

Let's hope that Craigslist sticks around for a few more years. It's big and getting bigger, and that means it will increasingly become a target for pranksters trying to take it down, and whiners filing lawsuits for the content it posts (some of which is certainly controversial). In the meantime, I plan on milking it for all it's worth!