Whether you’re looking for a new roommate or trying to get rid of an old mattress, you have to love Craigslist. Where else can you both find a date and free firewood?
Of course, there’s plenty of cheap office furniture for sale on the popular classifieds site from cubicles to desks and executive chairs. But if you’re trying to outfit your new business, Craigslist might not be the best place to go shopping. For one thing, you’ll likely have to deal with the hassles of picking and installing the furniture (and good luck finding the original instruction manuals for any of the pieces). You’ll also have to be on the lookout for damaged, broken, chipped, torn, stained, outdated, strange and otherwise well-worn furniture.
To illustrate these, we rounded up 6 fantastic Craigslist furniture fails:
1. Defects? What defects?
Remember glamour shots? Those photos people had taken of them where all of their less-than-attractive attributes were conveniently blurred? Well, sellers on CraigsList love that trick. Case in point, this leather desk chair. The poster says the chair is in mint condition, but there’s no way to confirm tears or broken armrests by looking at this fuzzy photo.
2. BYOD (Bring your own drawers)
Office furniture is heavy, so imagine how much you can save your back moving this small desk around without those pesky drawers? But what about storage, you ask? Who needs it? Just cram your office supplies in the empty space where the drawers used to be.
3. Refurbished Chair
Sometimes sellers attempt to fix furniture themselves in order to get a better selling price. Arnolds knows all about quality furniture repair and refurbishment, and we have to say we’re not impressed by the old packing tape around the arm rest routine. You might win points from some clients for your MaacGyver-esque hacks, but most likely they’ll run out your door into the arms of your more professional-looking competitor.
4. Office Furniture or Chew Toy?
We know when you’re buying used furniture, you don’t expect it to be immaculate. A few scratches here a small stain there comes with the territory of CraigsList shopping. But is buying a desk chair that looked like it spent its past life as a favorite chew toy for a 150-pound teething rottweiler really worth the savings?
5. A One-of-a-Kind Organ/Desk
Craigslist is home to plenty of unique finds. From potato cannons to henchmen, you can literally find anything you’d imagine on the site. Case in point, this pump organ turned desk. Sure, you might sing in your church choir, but does your weekend hobby really have a place at your 9 to 5? While your customers probably appreciate a certain amount of creativity, office furniture that could double as set pieces for a community theater production of “The Phantom of the Opera” might be a little too over the top.
6. For Your Office Circa 1950
When you’re not finding church organ/desks on Craigslist, you’re sifting through endless antiques. Looking for lightly used cubicles for your small business? First you’ll have to dig through dinged up rollback desks, old time school desks and typewriter stands. When’s the last time you even used a typewriter? Do your new employees even know what they are?
Head to Arnolds and you can enjoy browsing through our 100,000 square foot showroom stocked with high quality used and refurbished furniture from brands you know and trust. There’s no need to worry about whether pieces are missing or broken, if your furniture shows up looking like it was dropped off a 10-story building, or if it jumped on a time machine back in 1972.
