40 Hilarious Listings For Things Being Sold Online

u/Lyle_the_Crocodile, one of the moderators of the subreddit, said "people will sell almost anything, weird stuff from prosthetics to coffins, or stuff that's broken/worn out and they just don't want to throw it away."

"It can be overwhelming, looking at a local marketplace like Facebook Marketplace or Offerup, but I see it as a net positive," u/Lyle_the_Crocodile told Bored Panda. "If someone, somewhere wants your old prosthetic leg, it's better to sell it to them (or give it away), rather than having it end up in a dump. The clutter and chaos of the modern online marketplaces is a reflection of modern consumerism and waste, so it's hard to look at some of it, but it's important. A landfill full of prosthetic body parts is just as full as a landfill full of car tires and electronics."

Personally, the moderator thinks the most popular listings online feature something boring that people are upgrading, like phones or furniture. "There are a ton of people that... shall we say... underestimate or understate the wear and tear on a couch, for instance, and think that a couch that's torn up by a dog, or just decades of normal use, is still worth over $100."

However, u/Lyle_the_Crocodile thinks that there are a lot of joke listings as well. They said the mod team tries to not allow such content on the subreddit because they don't want it filled with "Among Us Shaped Chicken Nugget" posts, but they're not always successful. "If you click through Facebook Marketplace listings and view the sellers' profiles, it often becomes clear that they're posting it to be silly with their friends. I'd estimate that approximately 5% of all Gen Z guys, for example, have posted some variation of "For sale - THESE HANDS" (an invitation to fight, not an ad for manual labor, like my millennial brain initially thought)."

"On the other hand, a lot of the weird listings are real," the moderator highlighted. "I posted an ad on Facebook Marketplace for some medical training mannequins once, and FB alerted me every single time someone shared the post on their wall. Some of us sellers just want to reduce waste and make money, while making the world a more bizarre and happy place. In the case of the medical mannequins, I sold one to a commercial real estate agent that wanted to put it in surprising places in the buildings he was selling, with a hidden camera to catch the reaction of people when they see it. I sold several to a couple that was turning their pole dancing studio into a haunted house. Trust me, there are plenty of weird buyers to make it worth it for us weird sellers to keep doing what we're doing."

With 166K members, the community of r/WTFgaragesale is not very close-knit in any way. "It's more of a passive way to enjoy the absurdity inherent in the modern peer-to-peer e-commerce landscape," the moderator said. "Sometimes the threads are full of puns, other times disbelief and unanswerable questions about what kind of person sells x, y, or z, and every once in a while the thread will be just people defending the seller and telling the OP that the item in question isn't THAT weird."