I've been shopping for both a new daily and a new fun car for a few months now. I sold my Miata on to a GRM'er and I need something else to drive before I can sell my 850R, so I have now been thrown back into the gauntlet of Craigslist, FB marketplace, OfferUp, etc.
Despite having found stuff that I'm interested in on multiple occasions, I'm still empty handed. In some cases it's just bad timing (someone else beat me to it, etc). But I also find that it doesn't take a whole lot to make my Spidey sense tingle these days. Often times, through a combination of the ad itself and interactions with the seller, I will broadly pick up what I can just broadly describe as a "bad vibe" or a gut feeling that tells me something is weird, and I will decline to pursue anything further before even going to look at stuff. Like anything else sometimes there are genuine red flags, but I'm sure a lot of you would accuse me of overthinking things in many cases.
I've probably lost out on the better part of a dozen purchases because of this instinct. This is a relatively recent thing. I used to feel comfortable getting a stack of cash and going to look at pretty much anything (even when I probably should have seen some red flags!) but now I have a hard time mustering up the energy to do it unless the seller is really obviously someone who has their E36 M3 together and says all the right things.
It used to feel like you could kind of trust people in general more than you can now. In the past 10 years, I've had some stuff happen that has really shaken my faith in people. I got held up at gunpoint outside my workshop in Milwaukee while picking up some stuff for a track day at Road America. I sold a $500 Saab 900 to a guy who burned up the clutch then called me and threatened to kill me before abandoning the car in the middle of the road in the suburbs, costing me all of the money that I had made in tow and impound fees (big lesson to get a bill of sale). A couple years later, I sold a truck to a guy who seemed like a nice upstanding dude, who then used it to commit a robbery and abandoned it after a hit-and-run, which I discovered when the police came knocking (thank god for the bill of sale lesson on that one).
That's not even getting into the modern political situation. Without floundering I just want to state that it's yet another divider. Someone made a joke post on the Enablers Unanimous Facebook group yesterday that led to me making a pretty benign and jokey observation in return, to nobody in particular. This led to random people not even in the group jumping in to take me to task, they started tagging their buddies, and soon I'm getting random people I've never seen or heard of before sending me DMs to argue about politics. That was the final straw for the Book of Faces for me, which I had already dramatically decreased my usage of, but it was just like...what the hell? Is this really what people spend their free time doing these days? I can't even casually say something in a group of GRM dorks without it escalating into this big stupid thing!
I don't even really know where I'm going with this other than to say that I used to love buying and selling and wheeling and dealing and that feeling is just totally gone now. It's harder than ever to go into a potential transaction with a sense of "good faith" or even fundamental trust. Actual bona-fide scams are everywhere now but even a lot of the people that aren't full-on scammers aren't exactly on the up-and-up either. And even if someone is legit the modern political SNAFU has created another layer of frustration where some folks can't even put their opinions aside for a second to do a good old fashioned sale of goods over a handshake. Maybe I was just naive back in the day but it used to feel like there was a certain level of decorum or "having it together" you could count on when responding to a classified ad or going to look at something. Now I just feel like I have to have my guard up 100% right out of the gate and it makes every potential transaction feel like this excruciating process. Totally sucks the joy out of everything. And, of course, here I am going on five months looking for new vehicles because stuff just hasn't come together yet in a way I'm comfortable with, so I'm kind of punishing myself over my own anxieties at the end of the day.
Am I the only one that has been grappling with all this? At the end of the day this is probably just a big "the old days" lament through rose colored glasses, except "the old days" feel pretty damn recent, which feels weird.
