I recently started using Craigslist for buying and selling stuff, and I’m loving it.  So far, I’ve bought a set of bedroom furniture (second-hand Ikea, but very nice and far better than anything I had), gave away a laptop I couldn’t bring myself to throw out, sold some laptop RAM, and bought and  sold an aquarium.  I also have a couple ancient Pentium-3 computers that I’m hopefully giving away tomorrow night.

It’s so easy to unload my old junk that I’ve been looking around my apartment, wondering what else I’m willing to part with, and whether or not anyone would be willing to pay for any of it.  It’s certainly tons easier than eBay–I’ll never waste my time on them again.  It’s easy to see why eBay tried to buy Craigslist a while ago.

In a totally unrelated matter, I’ve discovered that it’s ridiculously expensive to find spare parts for my Roomba (those little robotic vacuum cleaners).  Mine stopped picking up dirt a while ago because of a stripped gear–too much cat fur–but I never got around to actually doing anything about it until this weekend.

I think a reasonable price for it would be about two bucks, if that.  It’s just a small chunk of plastic.  But, since it’s a niche product, I expected it would be around ten dollars.  After some searching, I found it for $11… plus a $5 service fee, plus $12 shipping.  I swore at the site for a while and kept looking.

I called every vacuum store in the city with no luck.  The majority of them didn’t even know what a Roomba was.  I then tried calling the manufacturer directly.  My reward for twenty minutes on hold was to be told that they don’t sell spare parts. Finally, after more than an hour of searching, I found another site selling the same part for $20, plus $5 shipping.  Unbelievably, that was still the best deal I could find.