Bike-Shedding with My Parents

Happy Monday. I'm on a novel-reading kick this week, so here's a funny story about a thing that happened when I visited my parents a couple of weeks ago. And why maybe a little bit of bike-shedding (leaning into the trivial) isn't always a bad thing.

Two weeks ago, I spent about three hours with my parents. I was back in Pennsylvania for a baby shower for a friend, and since they live locally, they picked me up to stay with them for the night. Little did I know, the visit would turn into an unexpected lesson in bike-shedding.

As soon as we reached the parking lot of the restaurant, my mom turned to me and declared, “Bethany, I have a big problem and I need your help.”

“Sure,” I say. “If I can’t figure it out, I’ll get an AI to do it for you.” (I say this because I’m the kind of daughter who gets a little thrill out of freaking out my mom with comments like this.) 

"What are you trying to do?”

“Sell our bike shed.”

“That sounds simple enough.”

“I posted it on facebook marketplace an hour ago and we have 100 people who want it. The messages just keep coming, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to decide. I need your help.”

“Oh, I can DEFINITELY get an AI to help you with this.”

She hands her phone back to me in the car. “Just… figure it out.”

“Hey,” my dad asks her gently. “We’ve only got a couple of hours to spend with Bethany tonight, are you sure this is what we want her to be spending her time on?”

“YES.” my mom interjects. “Just until we get home. Let her do her thing.”

I couldn’t help but reflect on the irony of the situation as we drove home. Here we were, fully immersed in the quintessential example of bike-shedding: focusing on a minor issue (selling a shed) amidst the more significant opportunity (spending quality time together). 

But I’m so amused by the prospect of this problem that I just can’t look away.

We’ve got about 25 minutes in the car ride until I get home. When I first open Facebook Messenger on my mom’s phone, she has 103 unread messages about selling this shed in their backyard.

By the time I reorient myself on Facebook (which I haven’t used in 4 years) and the Marketplace features (which I’ve never used), another 3-5 messages have rolled in. So the first thing I decide to do is pause the listing.

“Wow, they just keep coming in!” I remark.

”I KNOW,” she says. 

The second thing I notice is that they are selling this shed for $100.

“Is this a typo?” I ask. 

“No,” my dad replies.

“We just want to get rid of it,” says my mom. “But we cannot remove it ourselves. They need to come and get it on their own.”

I start reading the messages.

It’s unclear to me at first glance if most of the messages are from an AI or from humans, since nearly all of them say simply, “Hi, is this still available?” No customization. No names. No specifically directed inquiry about the shed itself.

Advice for anyone here who buys anything on Facebook marketplace. If you write literally anything other than, “Hi, is this still available?” you will stand out. Maybe try that sometime.

My first theory is that Facebook Marketplace has been overcome by bots and this is just some weird bot attack of sorting through the signal from the noise. But then I start getting to some messages that seem a little more helpful.

“$100???”

“Is this really just $100?”

“I live nearby. If selected I will make you a better offer for this shed.”

“You know this is worth at least $1,000 right?”

As a lifelong renter, I don’t know anything about houses, let alone sheds. But I do know how to read the signals of a micro-market. And what I realize has happened is that my parents have vastly under-priced their shed.

“Um…” I interrupt. “People are saying that this shed is worth at least $1,000. Are you sure you want to sell this for $100?

“We made a promise,” says my mom.

“I mean…” I push on her. “Technically, you didn’t make a promise to anyone specifically. You threw out a first pass pricing hypothesis. And what we are seeing now is that your initial hypothesis is actually quite low and you could easily increase this. It might also help you suss out the more serious buyers from the bots.”

“I keep my word,” insists my mom.

“But mom.” 

“$100.”

I let one minute pass among us in silence.

“How about this,” I offer. “What if we split the difference? If I can sell this shed for $500, can I keep $400 and you’ll still get $100?”

“Yes,” says my dad.

“NO.” says my mom.

“UGH. You guyyyyyyys,” I whine, slipping back into my high school singsongy voice. “You realize this is why I have such a hard time pricing myself as an independent worker and understanding the true market value of my skills in this capitalist world, right? If you consistently underprice yourself, you’ll keep setting yourself up for the same outcome. At some point, you just need to read the market and price things for what they’re actually worth.”

I pause, waiting for them to take the bait. Are we about to dive into a critical analysis of my current employment status as a fractional worker with no W2 job, a topic I know stresses them out to no end?

“I have always worked in nonprofits. I will always work in nonprofits,” my mom replies firmly.

“Yeah, that’s exactly my point.”

I wait another beat.

“We said we’re selling it for $100. So we’re selling it for $100.”

And just like that, we’re back to the bike shed.

I keep scanning through messages, ignoring most of them. 

Eventually I surface three possible contenders. One from someone who lives nearby and has offered to come see the shed tomorrow. One from someone who lives in a neighboring city and says they would have no problem picking it up with their rollback truck. And a third from a person who says he wants to gift it to a single mom in his life so her teenagers can store their bikes in it.

“I like that one,” says my mom. “It sounds like she really needs it.”

Which is when I realize this is an exercise in philanthropic giving, not corporate gain.

Given the volume of the inbound, I decide that it will be important to vet this person before inviting him to their home and just handing over basically a free shed. He asks where we live. I give him my mom’s phone number and ask him to call when he can. He calls 2 minutes later. I pass the phone to my mom. She panics and passes it back to me. I roll my eyes.

“Hi, this is Janeen,” I say. “Are you calling about the bike shed?”

There are a few things I decide on the spot that will be important to evaluate about this person to ensure that he’s “a good guy.” These are:

• Is he telling the truth? Does his story check out, and is he really using this shed for what he says it’s for?

• Is he reliable? Will he show up when he says he will? 

• Is he prepared? Does he have the tools and truck needed to procure the shed on his own?

I don’t even worry about asking whether he can pay the $100 since it’s become so patently obvious that we underpriced this thing by at least $1,000 that it’s almost a joke.

“Are you really just selling this shed for $100?” is his first question.

I point to the phone and roll my eyes again at my parents. 

“Yes,” I laugh a little. “It’s really just $100. I know this probably seems like a too-good-to-be-true deal. But we really just need to get rid of it, and we want it to go to someone who needs it.”

In about five minutes, we cover the basics: The condition of the shed, what he intends to use it for (a single mom friend of his who doesn’t have enough space in her home for things like kid bikes). I give him the condition, remind him that he’ll need to bring his own truck and he might need to pull into the shed from the side, instead of the back, due to some large shrubs in the way.

“Oh, I’m a landscaper,” he volunteers. “So if we do need to move the shrubs, I can help you sort that out too.”

That’s a point in the right direction.

At some point he starts asking me much more technical questions about the shed and the yard that I have no idea how to answer but thankfully we arrived home right at that time, so I head to the backyard to survey the space with him still on the phone. I promise to take photos of the yard, all sides of the shed, and the street he can use to access it.

While I’m on the phone I see my parents shrugging their shoulders and laughing with the neighbors in the backyard. I overhear the words, “Oh no, I’m so sorry but I think we just sold the shed right now!"

I roll my eyes again and conclude the call, then send a few photos and my parents’ address to the caller.

“I’ve confirmed interest with two people,” I tell them. “This first guy should come by before 3 tomorrow. If you like him and he wants it, you should sell him the shed. If you don’t like him, then another guy will come by after 3pm. That guy has already told me he would make us a better offer for the shed.”

Now my parents roll their eyes.

“But it’s up to you if you want to do that, obviously.”

“What would we do without you?” asks my mom. I think she’s serious. 

I took the train back to New York City early the next morning so wasn’t at home for the completion of the saga, but I texted my mom midday to see how things went with the sale of the bike shed.

She enthusiastically sent me back 11 photos by text message – of a pickup truck collecting the shed, of the empty yard, and the contents of the shed strewn about their living room. She expressed awe at how quickly and efficiently they were able to remove the shed from their yard (without needing to destroy any shurbs), and how happy she was to hear it would be going to someone who really needed it.

“Wow wow wow!” I texted back. "So glad this worked out."

“Did you see the little snakes?” she texted back. “They were living under the logs. And all those acorns from the squirrels!!!!”

I looked more closely at the photo of the ground where the shed had been and, sure enough, spotted a couple of garter snakes. I just shook my head and smiled.

This was never about selling a bike shed. This was about getting a good story. And you can't put a price on that.