"A misconception that people have about Buy Nothing, if they're unfamiliar with it, is that it's charity," says Cisar. "The number one goal of Buy Nothing, at least for the group I'm in, is to save things from going into the garbage."
Clark, the co-founder, has seen some strange gifts and requests in groups. A neighbor once asked for a plot of land to bury a beloved dog. In the Pacific Northwest, a more-common-than-you'd-think posting is for owl pellets, a term for the bird's regurgitations, where the skeletal remains of the animals it's eaten are often preserved.
"A lot of home-schooling families or teachers ask for owl pellets," Clark says, "because the students get to go through them and learn about the various bones."
There's an Instagram account (there always is!) called "the best of buy nothing," which documents odd items that show up on the giveaway groups. Sex toys make frequent appearances. Other finds have included an empty (used) container for cremated remains, an X-ray film of the giver-awayer's head and neck and a deflated volleyball.
There's a lid for every pot, as the saying goes. Who could possibly want a terrifyingly realistic animatronic chimpanzee head, which loudly grunts and bellows? And which has sensors so its eyes follow you as you move? (And which was also broken, according to the owner?)
That would be Britny Adams, 36, of Colleyville, Texas.
When a member of her Buy Nothing group posted the bellowing chimp head last week, Adams went for it.
"I commented that I wanted it to scare my mother, because she had a pet monkey growing up in the 70's," she said.
The piece wasn't actually broken, Adams says. The batteries were just stuck. Now it bellows great. The chimp head, she says, has provided hours of entertainment for her six-year-old child - and hours of abject terror for her dog. They named him Ape Ventura.
The plan might have been to prank her mother, but Adams ended up pranking herself. When she returned home last week from an evening with friends, she suddenly noticed Ape Ventura, staring at her in the dark. Adams screeched with fright. Her husband screeched with laughter. Ape Ventura screeched with screeching monkey noises.
There is something about free stuff that makes us abandon all rational thought.
"What our research has basically shown is that when people encounter items that are free, they overvalue them," says Nina Mazar, a marketing professor at Boston University's Questrom School of Business.
Take, for example, the case of the two granola bars.
Anna Paone Levy, 32, didn't really like a box of almond coconut chocolate chip granola bars that she'd ordered on Instacart. After eating a few of them, she posted them on Buy Nothing, and somebody claimed the remaining two. Which, on the one hand ... two granola bars? Really? On the other hand, heck yeah - two free granola bars!
"From an economics perspective, we would just value those costs and the benefits," says Mazar. Are two granola bars, worth no more than a dollar each, worth walking 15 minutes for? Most people value their time at a higher rate than that, and so would be losing value on the deal, even if the bars were free. (Paone Levy didn't know how far the woman had traveled.)
It goes the other way, too. People could try to sell all the miscellaneous stuff that ends up on Buy Nothing, but given the time and effort (and perhaps guilt) that comes with finding a buyer, giving it away can be the more economical solution.
And many people put their junk on Buy Nothing simply because it is unsellable.
After Paone Levy unloaded the two granola bars, her husband tweeted with astonishment about the exchange - a post that provoked other people to share their own observations about Buy Nothing's bizarro economy. One person posted a screenshot of a free squeegee and used toilet brush that, despite the giver's assurances that he "ran both through dish washer," still bore some alarming brown stains. Another person shared an offer of birth control pills - but only the row of placebos at the bottom of the pack.
