A mastery in OLX

Of note – Politics, Economy, Society turns sixteen tomorrow. This means I have run a blog for a whopping 43% of my lifetime and 83% of my adult life.

But by the time I formally became adult, if I wanted to get rid of some useless stuff, firstly I needed to place free-of-charge ad in yellow pages of local Gazeta Wyborcza, then stuff could be disposed of via Allegro.pl portal, most likely by putting them out to auction. I recall well an event, around May 2011, when a guy came with his father to pick up some tools and they have virtually cleaned up my parents’ garage and paid PLN 1,100 for items we considered useless.

In the meantime, online selling has evolved and in terms of non-clothing stuff has been nearly monopolised by OLX. I began to use it in 2018 to sell for a song pieces of equipment left by the vendor of my newly purchased flat. I raised around PLN 1,000 back then, which had a tiny, yet a contribution to the refurbishment budget.

Since then I occasionally used OLX to find new possessors for stuff I no longer needed and was elated to extend their lives, especially as I was growing fond of the circular economy. A major revolution came some time ago, when OLX launched cheap deliveries via parcel lockers. The only drawback of solution is that you need to keep count of sale transactions finalised over one calendar year, not to exceed 30 sold items (or the equivalent of EUR 2,000), so that OLX does not file a report of your dabbling in trading to a tax office.

I also taught my ex-girlfriend to manage heaps of her (why do women tend to accumulate more than men?) useless belongings via OLX and Vinted, thus all in all over the last two years we sold (with delivery or in-person pick-up) around 100 items. We have not managed to recover a lot of money from it, yet financial aspect is not the crucial one. Fostering the concept of the circular economy and letting somebody buy decent stuff at a bargain price is a paramount idea behind putting stuff out on OLX. To nurture it, I have also become a buyer on OLX and have come by many nearly unused items at dirt cheap prices. On the other side were frequently thoughtless buyers, yet I do not feel guilty of my purchases – those people have not thrown their useless belongings to a rubbish bin and might learn from their mistakes not to make next reckless purchases.

Reduce, resell, repair, recycle, renew, reuse, but do not increase the output of new goods! A propos, if you need to have your small white goods repaired quickly and at decent price, I wholeheartedly recommend Serwis AGD Ryszard Rogal in the district of Ursus. They have revived a seemingly dead vacuum cleaner my parents wanted to dispose of us for a mere PLN 60 and within 2 business days.