Thursday, June 18, 2009

a few nibbles, hoping for bites

(by Pat)

We've had five people from Craigslist ask to see the car so far, which feels good, since it was only posted on Monday. Two people stopped by on Tuesday, and I'm hoping for two more today.

The first guy came with his wife and small daughter, looking to move into a larger car for their growing family. They were Hispanic immigrants--she didn't speak much English, but he was fluent and we hit it off pretty well. He seemed to like the car, but she was disappointed it doesn't have electric windows. (It's a pretty basic car, but I figure that's just less stuff to break.) They didn't have time to take it for a drive, but said they might come back for another look. We'll see.

The second guy was a mechanic, I'm guessing he was from India, and brought along his aged father. He looked it over and didn't turn his nose up at the car, which is a good sign. Turns out he's looking for a car for his wife, so he said he'd have to come back with her, maybe on Friday.

My experience selling other things on Craigslist is that half the time people never show up, so I was glad these folks actually came to look at the car. I'm curious to see how many viewings it'll take. Ten?

So far, we've only listed it on Craigslist, but we might try cars.com pretty soon, as well as other sites. It's been a busy week around here with other life stuff, so this has been about all the traffic I can handle at the moment.

At the moment, the idea of having this extra cash from the sale of car gives us a perpetual list of stuff we plan to do with the money--buy a new light for my bike, sign up for a bike repair class, frame a picture, go out for pizza, etc. We have a growing list that would require us to sell several cars, but it's fun to think about anyway.

We're still using the car a little bit, while it's here, but are trying to do a lot more by bike and T (though there's a soccer tournament this weekend, where I'm supposed to bring five players, and it might not be so bad if the car isn't sold quite yet...)

2 comments:

  1. What a cool thing to do, Patrick! I wish my city (Los Angeles) wasn't so unwieldy. I loved the days, when I was back in Oregon, where I could bike to work. It felt wonderful, I saw so much more, and my exercise and need to get somewhere were converging in a wonderfully functional way.

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  2. We're very lucky that Boston is small and fairly bikable. And there are plans afoot to continue to improve the infrastructure for bikes (if the economy can turn around).

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