likewater

Okay so heres my rant. Why do some people on Craigslist arbitrarily require people to call them rather than text them about the goods they are selling?

I tried to buy some cycling goods from an individual who demanded to discuss things over the phone when a text perfectly handled all angles of the transaction, and was rude when I gave him the business on how texting is way better and flexible.

It's 2017. Texting is a superior form of communication for all things that don't absolutely require a phone call. A lot of people have careers that offer very, very little spare time to chit chat and most of those same people have children that require the remainder of their attention. Texting allows you to get the hell on with your business/errands and still communicate with others. But for some reason, folks on Craigslist seem to not understand this.

A lot of them even end up being quite rude about their demands and as a result lose their sale.

What is the big deal? You're trying to sell something. Its not a social club. You don't have to talk on the phone. You just dont. Texting is extremely flexible and after a day of hard work and commuting home to a wife and kids, chores and helping with homework, who has the time to make a needless phone call to buy 50 dollars worth of goods?

Then you have the paranoid morons that say they don't want to meet up with someone they haven't spoken to on the phone to see how they are. That's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. How can anyone that passed the 4th grade actually believe that hearing someone's voice over the phone will give them any idea of a person's character and honesty? Every serial killer ever was really nice to the person they viciously killed 5 minutes before it happened. Every persons spouse that cheated on them lied straight to their face for years and years before the truth came out. Anybody can lie over the phone with the same shade that they have with a text. If the person's efforts are focused towards robbing/kidnapping/murdering you, no phone conversation is going to reveal that. But nah bro, you can totally determine if this individual is a good person and distinguished contributing member of society by talking to them for 60 seconds about a turbo trainer. Makes sense. Craigslist is a dose of the real world, and notater what you do, you always run some risk of encountering a psycho that's going to kidnap you and harvest your organs. That's the risk you take trying to get a steal on an item rather than buying from the store, and it's your risk to take or not. If you're scared go to church.

If anything, I feel like people that absolutely insist on phone calls do so because they themselves are the shady end of the deal. They don't want to answer questions through text because the answers will turn buyers away because the seller knows himself he is hiding something, and they want to speak with them vocally in an attempt to gauge the person's intelligence and see if they can be BS'd or not. Additionally, if they succeed with their shady deal, they don't want any evidence being laid out via text for law enforcement to use against them in case legal action is brought against them. During my days of flipping cars, I dealt with numerous shady sellers who wouldn't discuss the car over call or text under any circumstance, and demanded that all discussions be in person when they come see the car. They did this not only because they wanted to gauge a person's BS meter and not have any evidence of lies about the vehicle being recorded over text, but they wanted to force the potential buyer to make a time/fuel investment in the deal because they know if they reveal everything about the bum vehicle over text, all the buyers with half a brain will never come through and make that investment, and for good reason, and they will never sell the car.

Has anyone else had this problem?