Originally Posted by
Snydermann
Well put. Hawking on an under-priced bicycle on craigslist so you can take it home and mark it up without doing anything to it just seems skeezy. Logic says there is fundamentally nothing wrong with it, but my gut reaction says that it's skeezy. Get a real job and let some other folks get a deal sometimes.
You do realise that there are at least 13.9 million people without jobs in the USA and you're gonna whine about someone for making a couple hundred bucks off someone that wants a vintage bike; someone that is likely relatively well-off to have an esoteric hobby like vintage bikes. If the person reading the ad on CL managed to find it all by themselves they can use the googles to look up bike prices and get much more informed, hell they might even find the original ad. No one is getting taken advantage of, many are just too lazy to put the research in.
How much of this anti-flipper sentiment is just sour grapes? I think the only legit criticism is that the bike might not be mechanically sound but that's why any smart buyer would use that as leverage to get a lower price and the seller would likely respond quite well to a low-ball offer knowing he scored sweet in the first place.