What's It Worth To You?

I've been using my little friend Craigslist recently to get rid of some unwanted items: Three sets of workout DVDs and a two-day pass to the Mile High Music Festival (I bought five passes and, wouldn't you know it, one of the five bailed on me!).

The workout DVDs I priced at $30/set, but I wrote in there that I was willing to negotiate, which was a good thing. Turns out the sets are worth between $7.50 and $10. (I bought them each for more than $100 -- don't do that!) I'm dropping two of the three sets off to the buyer today and mailing the other set to the buyer as soon as her money order arrives in the mail. The only people who responded to that ad were the people who ended up purchasing the DVDs.

(For those who are curious, I'm getting rid of these sets because Jillian Michaels' 30-Day Shred is shorter and more effective than all of them combined. Do yourself a favor and pay $15 for a new copy of that -- cheaper on Amazon -- and skip the heavily advertised, multiple-DVD sets. Her DVD contains three levels of workouts, so you can grow with it. And at only twenty minutes per workout ... well ... it's awesome. I'll just say that. You have very few excuses to skip it.)

I've been kind of amused by the responses to the MHMF tickets. I asked for the same price I purchased them at -- $160, minus a service fee. Actually, that's a little cheaper than the face value of $162.50. So really, a good deal. Unless, of course, they wanted to split up the days -- then I asked for $90 per day, which is the face value of the ticket.

I have received at least a dozen e-mails about the tickets. The winner was the third girl who e-mailed me ... I didn't do first-come, first-served, because she offered me $170 for the two tickets. Score! But in several of those e-mails, people want to haggle with me. "I will pay you $130 for the tickets." "I have $125 cash that you can have."

Um. I'm already selling these tickets at a loss -- there was approximately an $8 to $9 service fee that I had to pay when I bought them. Why on earth would I take an extra $35 to $40 loss on them?

I e-mailed back the first guy who tried to haggle and told him that the tickets were spoken for, the girl was paying me $170, and I wasn't going to sell them at a loss. He responded with something along the lines of, "You're lucky, a lot of people are taking a loss on this."

Yeah, maybe if they bought the tickets with the intent to make a bunch of money off them. But that's just wrong, anyway. I saw all the Phish/Red Rocks tickets for sale there ... $200 a pop! You would have to be living under a rock and a total idiot to pay that! (You would pretty much have to be a total idiot to want to see Phish anyway. But that's a rant for another day.)

So, in summary: On Craigslist, it's okay to haggle for my workout DVDs. But I'm just going to laugh at you if you try to haggle for my music-festival tickets. I could probably sell them outside the festival for even more than that ... but ... I'm too nice to do something cruel like that. I just want most of my money back, and I'm happy.