Skip to main content

The postal route

We meet many people through selling our excess stuff. Some are fascinating. Some funny. Some odd. Some a little weird.

Today a local buyer declined to pick up their desired item. Or to have me bring it to him/her. I say him/her because even their profile name sounded more like a code name, giving away no information.

The instructions were to wait for the all-clear and then deposit the item at a designated letterbox (presumably theirs). The money would be in a side compartment.

This was definitely a first. Unexpected and a little strange. I might not have done it, but being very local I did it during my afternoon walk. I'll probably never know who the buyer was - or why they wanted this secretive method.

In my free ebook Less Clutter More Cash I said selling to people can be fun and interesting. At the time I didn't expect that to include doing a spy-like drop-off to a secret identity.

Now that I've done it, I think they're onto a pretty good idea. Letterboxes are handy for local transactions. No need to arrange a mutually convenient time. No waiting around when someone's late. The buyer only travels as far as their letterbox. At first it's odd, but now I like the idea of discarding my excess stuff and collecting cash from neighbourhood letterboxes.

Like a reverse vending machine - I deposit the item and take the cash
Like a reverse vending machine
I deposit the item and take the cash

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

5 Reasons why we hoard - and they're wrong

"Less is More" is one of the catch-cries of downsizing. Often the fewer things we have the more we value them. So it's a great title for a book that's basically a manual for how to de-clutter your home. The introductory chapter of Less is More: How to De-clutter Your Life gives some great insights into why we find it so hard to reduce our stuff. Here are 5 of them - the last one is one of the biggest for me. 1. The cost of holding on. We were raised by our parents and grandparents and in their day items were expensive and space was cheap. It made sense in those days to hold onto stuff just in case you ever needed it. But today housing is expensive and items are cheap. It's hard to change a habit, but now we save much more by downsizing. 2. Keeping it in the family. For some reason we prefer to give things to those close to us. Again this was viable in the days of big families and lots of children to receive hand-me-downs. But these days we have smaller fa...

20 unplugged ideas

May 1-7 is Screen-Free Week . It's about spending time away from the screen and more time with each other - or doing things we love. It's a great chance to break the work-tired-watchTV-ads-shop-work cycle. This list of twenty alternative ideas is great for screen-free week. It's also a great reminder of things we could enjoy if we're shopping and spending less - and maybe working less and enjoying life more.

Will robots take your job?

The future could be very different. It's one reason I started this blog. What will technology mean for jobs? For incomes? For society? So I was excited to find Will Robots Take Your Job? at my local library. What does the book say? There's always been technological change and we've always found jobs. As the more laborious jobs were taken by machines, we took on higher skilled jobs, moving further up the "skill ladder". The main question is whether this time is different. Will the "skill ladder" continue to have higher rungs for humans to move on to? Will these rungs appear as quickly as the current rungs disappear? Either way we're headed for significant disruption. Either large-scale re-training of our workforce or massive unemployment. The author despairs that our leaders seem not to talk about this - and worse still, not have a plan for it. Farmers or horses? In 1870 about 75% of Americans worked in agriculture and used 25 million hors...