A secondary furniture market?

A common comment you might hear in this industry is: Where is the secondary market for furnishings? When furniture is no longer needed in your home, where should it go?

This is probably no secret, but aside from the hand-me-down route and Goodwill shops, you might try Craigslist. I recently sold the bulk of my furniture on Craigslist. I probably made about $200 cash in less than a week, selling a mattress, a dining room table, a sofa and a couple occasional tables.

If the buyer doesn’t want it, they don’t buy it. I even made a profit on the sofa.

All items were priced to move. It was better than a yard sale and everybody came to me and picked up what they wanted. One couple just moved here from California and bought my mattress for $50.

It was easy to put the items up. And it was free!

I cruise Craigslist when I can. I got a great deal on a Deering Goodtime open-back banjo off the site for far less than I could ever have expected to buy from any secondhand shop. I just met the seller at a shopping center and got my banjo.

Go visit the site at www.craigslist.org. By the standards of the fickle Web 2.0 overlords, this is a site that looks like crap and does nothing. No bells and whistles, no Digg, no RSS, no blogs, no tweets and no Facebook.

In other words, no constant distraction from what you really want or came there for in the first place. It’s a site that does what it is supposed to do really well.

Isn’t there something to be said for that? For doing what you do as well as you can do it? Maybe the Internet isn’t so complicated after all.

This is not an argument that everything should be free or without advertising on the Internet either.

Heck, I still buy CDs of artists from the 1920s and 1930s you can’t download anywhere. ANYWHERE. That’s a service I’ll pay Amazon for to link me with a seller, or that I’ll pay some obscure label to mail. Or I’ll pay to get the best deal on that missing cord to my percolator or a cast iron skillet handle cozy.

It just seems to me that the people who make money on the Internet are the ones who do a good job of providing the best service in their niche, which if you read Mike Dugan’s “The Furniture Wars” is how the best furniture companies get ahead.

Wired has a feature story on Craigslist this week, noting that the site draws 47 million users a month. If the goal of the Internet is gain the most “unique visitors,” Craigslist is winning the war. As the Wired story says, “Craigslist gets more traffic than either eBay or Amazon .com. eBay has more than 16,000 employees. Amazon has more than 20,000. Craigslist has 30.”

No big flashy ads or pop-ups. It’s easy to use. And it’s one of the most successful sites on the Internet. Is there something to be said for simplicity? For doing what you do well?

And what if somebody bought it? Wouldn’t it be pretty easy for some other Craig to start another list?