Why I don't FREECYCLE anymore

When I lived in California, as I cleaned out 20+ years of accumulated stuff in preparation to move to South Africa, I Freecycled...a lot.

Freecycle is an international Yahoo group dedicated to keeping stuff out of the landfills by giving it away to people who can use it. The various Freecycle organizations act as a clearinghouse: those with stuff to get rid of, advertise it for free and those who want it, come get it. Also, those who need stuff can advertise...also for free. It's a win-win situation, especially for the landfills.

Between garage sales, eBay, Craigslist and Freecycle, I managed to clean out a cluttered house in record time and with minimal impact to the landfills. It was so successful that when I got settled in Cape Town, I joined the local Freecycle group. Sure enough...when I was packing to move from Cape Town to Johannesburg five years later, Freecycle came to the rescue again. I advertised a "pick up load of miscellaneous computer stuff, including a G3 Mac" and the phone rang off the hook!!

So, one would expect even better from Johannesburg, right? It is bigger, busier, stingier...all the things that make a "free stuff" website appealing, right?

Wrong.

When I first tried to join the Joburg group the moderator didn't bother to admit me, decline my membership request, or even respond to my emails. Eventually, after I contacted the HQ of the group, the individual got back to me and processed my membership. But this was a harbinger of things to come.

My husband is diabetic and one day at the pharmacy his pharmacist gave him a brand new glucose test kit. The manufacturer was giving them away to selected patients as a promo, and Hubby was selected. After opening the box, examining the machine and reading the literature, he decided he didn't want it and gave it to me to Freecycle. For WEEKS after I submitted my ad, I waited for it to show up on the site. Eventually it did, but the response was disappointingly low.

I began to realize that months...literally months...go by without my seeing a Freecycle ad show up in my mailbox. So few people use the site that it takes weeks to get enough ads to put up a digest of half a dozen items. It took a while for me realize what apparently everybody else around here already knew: the Freecycle site is poorly attended, not because there aren't any interested parties, but because the management of the site is so inattentive that it might as well not exist.

You see, there is another free site here, Gumtree. You can buy and sell stuff, rent apartments, find jobs...kind of a latter-day Craigslist. And, there is a section for free stuff...and people post there. Free stuff changes hands in Johannesburg, it just doesn't do it through Freecycle.

So, today I have a lot of plants to give away. Nice plants dug out of my overgrown garden. The first place I though of was Freecycle, but based on previous experiences with the local group, these plants will long be compost before the ad even appears on the site! So I posted the ad on Gumtree...free to me, free to the takers, no Rip van Freecycle to deal with.