There’s also a downside of free. Anyone who has posted on Craigslist free knows. You almost always want to put an absurdly low price on it not free. That screens the “free tattoo at a party” people out. You don’t need that behavior in your day.
Maybe I'm just lucky or maybe being rural has something to do with it but I've given away a few different items locally on FB marketplace and have only found people who showed up and were really happy to receive them. I'll probably stop doing that if I get a dreadful entitled person, but so far so good.
I gave away some broken tools on Craigslist once and had a similar experience. 2 people showed up really happy, one was entitled. Didn’t really scare me off though.
Agreed. Another way of looking at it is that people trawling craigslist free value their own time very low, and thus are unlikely to respect your time much either.
Or they don't value the product because it's free. Every time I've posted something free on craigslist, the person is much more likely to no-show or keep rescheduling pick up times, so much so that I won't do it anymore.
You'd think that someone who valued their own time less would value your time more in comparison.
Well I'm sure if my goal was to perversely waste their time, I could repeatedly cancel, no show, and make them jump through other hoops that would take a lot of their time but much less of mine (sending the emails). And thus they would indeed be valuing my time more than theirs, as I played some kind of sadistic power game. But since my goal is simply to get rid of an item to a good home, then the more time I spend sending emails, waiting around for someone to no show etc, is pure loss.
The other solution to this is something like Buy Nothing which limits the pool of recipients to people within your neighborhood.