OBO

We've all seen those little words in an ad... "or best offer". Usually what that means to me is:'here's our asking price, give us that amount or some reasonable amount less; we just want to get rid of it'.

We saw this old buffet/dresser posted on craigslist with a really reasonable asking price, followed by those little words after:


OK, that means that I need to jump on it fast before someone else gets there; usually first person to respond wins. I email my interest. She emails back this:

Hi, Thanks for your interest in our buffet. We have had several responses to our ad so we are contacting people who are interested in seeing the buffet. My # is (deleted). Call if you would like to schedule a time to come by between the hours of 12-5 pm. We are in the (deleted) area I and will give you the address if you call. The price is $(deleted) obo and we will be taking bids from the folks who are interested. We can help deliver this in the Portland metro area which means we have a trailer and one set of hands so we need you to provide the other set. This is a very heavy piece and not to be sexist but you will need a guy to help. Thanks -(deleted)

I was stuck at work and wrote this:

Hi (deleted),

Got stuck at work; I'm so sorry. Thanks for thinking of me though. The buffet is beautiful. I'm sure it will sell (or already sold) really quickly.
Cheers,
L

I get this back the next day:

Hi Lisa, If you want to see the buffet we will be here until 6:30 pm tonight.

So we went and saw it last night. Very cool, sturdy and old. Not in perfect shape, but a ton of charm. Turns out, they were taking bids and a phone number from everyone that came to see it. Each person wrote their bid on a little scrap piece of paper. Kind of like a silent auction without knowing the other bids. I've never seen this version of 'obo' before. I asked if she'd divulge some insider information and she mentioned that all bids were really close to the asking price. So we wrote down our bid (pretty much asking price) and handed it in. They asked if we needed help moving it, which we declined since ken explained we had a truck.

"That helps your offer a lot," she replied and told us she'd let us know on Saturday after everyone's seen it.

Bizarre. Is our best offer not the money but having the truck to haul it off?