I’m going to go out on a limb and request from this community a bit of help. Hopefully my tenure in these forums (if not a bit of a weak post count) has allowed me to ask this of all of you. If not, feel free to flame away. I’m sure there will be a few ‘wrong forum JONG’ replies but I didn’t want this clogging up the gear thread, especially as the season approaches.
The setup for this ask:
We all have A LOT of gear in our collective garages, attics, basements - I’m sure even overflowing into other areas of our houses. For many of us, a good portion of this gear goes unused year after year either because we have replaced it with something newer or we just don’t have the time to use it like we once did.
The Gear Swap forum provides a tremendous opportunity for us to make a bit of cash while passing quality deals along to our friends. But having sold a number of items there I also know it still comes with a bit of work. Things like posting pictures, negotiating price, bumping posts, transferring funds, and sending/receiving the gear once sold. While this is easy enough for certain items, it can be downright challenging for others (think sending a pair of mounted skis). These same issues exists across sites like Craigslist, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, GearTrade, etc.
For me, some of these challenges have prevented me from passing along a good amount of quality gear that I know could absolutely find a better home - for example, with someone who is just getting into the sport and finds the cost of new gear to be incredibly prohibitive or perhaps someone who is ready to move on from the beginner gear they bought a few years ago. Thus it is left to sit collecting dust for another year (or five). Worst case scenario it eventually ends up in the landfill once my wife gets tired of looking at it.
I have a solution in mind for this, but could use the expertise of the collective here to determine if it is even conceptually viable.
One additional item that I felt like it was important to make clear...this is not an effort to steal ‘business’ from this community. It will be a very small-scale local solution if it were ever to come to fruition.
To best gauge your thoughts on this matter, I’ve included below a brief survey. My final ask is this - please just take it seriously. If you think that I am out of line by asking for your help, feel free to fire away with replies below. Not to be overly cheesy, but the results of this survey may have a meaningful impact on me personally so I’ll just ask that any answers you submit are real.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/YCBM2KY
I truly appreciate your help with this!
Ron
TL;DR - I have an idea but no clue as to whether it’s viable. Can you help me out by taking this survey?
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