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Jack Tame: I'm done with Facebook Marketplace flakes

Author: Jack Tame ,
Publish Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2026, 10:02am

I bought some second-hand bunks this week. High quality. Good stuff. Perfect for the nine-year-old’s bedroom. But to make way for his new addition, I needed to pack up his old bed.

It was a king single – nothing fancy. Built from a little kit set with Allen key screws and cheap wood. But the bed was still in reasonable condition, and even though we didn’t need it anymore, I figured it might be useful for another family. At the very least, before condemning it to landfill, I thought it worth a quick check.

Brand new, the bed must only have cost $400, so I did what I thought was the right thing. I took a few photos then I took it apart, labelled the screws, and neatly stacked up the various pieces. I put an ad on Facebook Marketplace: Free kid’s bed frame. King single. Free if you’re happy to pick it up.

Now, look. I know there’s more than enough junk in this world. I didn’t have any grand expectations that anyone would even want the bed. I certainly didn’t oversell it. But no sooner had I put it online, I started receiving messages asking if it was available. Yep, I said. It sure is. I marked the listing as sold and with the first person to message me, I arranged a time to hand over the bed the following day.

Given I was due to be at work, I explained to the buyer I’d have to sort out someone else to be home to help with the handover instead of leaving the bed outside in the rain. Job done, I figured. All sorted. Win-win.

Except the person never showed. Never turned up. Never messaged to explain or apologise. Just went incommunicado. Ghosted me. They’d been dead keen 24 hours earlier, but something, apparently, had changed. Even though they knew I was arranging to get someone else to be at home to give them something they wanted for free, apparently I wasn’t worth even a cursory note.

It’s funny how different trading fora have slightly different cultures. When I was a kid, before the internet was really in use and TradeMe was a thing, we had the Buy, Sell and Exchange. It cost a few bucks to buy each week, and it was a treasure trove of junk. I was too young to trade anything, but I loved browsing through the pages. If you had any questions about an item, you had to give someone a call.

We had the Trading Post on radio, which was always an amazing listen, and TradeMe’s been the big digital player here since its inception. But these days, Facebook Marketplace is responsible for a growing number of trades. In my experience, it’s usually for stuff that’s less suitable for auctions. A fixed price. A quick trade. Bob’s your uncle.

It’s also the best place for giving stuff away for free or nearly for free. There’s no fee. No one pays anything. But there’s a downside. This week’s saga with the bed wasn’t the first time I’ve been stood up without explanation by someone who a few hours earlier was apparently desperate for an item and grateful to be receiving it for nothing. I’ve only done about half a dozen trades on Marketplace. I reckon for half of them I’ve been stood up.

I just find it so rude. Who are these people? I can’t imagine messaging a stranger, knowing they’d made arrangements to help me with something, and then changing my mind and being so unconcerned with how it affected them, that I wouldn’t even bother sending them a sentence.

Maybe it says something about our wider culture. It’s transactional. People aren’t bothered by throw-away relationships. You’re only valuable to someone else if they can get something out of you.

I put the bed back up online and someone else immediately asked if they could take it. They’re supposed to collect it today, so we’ll see how that works out. But honestly, it wasn’t the bed that got me, it was the principle.