Last week, someone listed 32GB of RAM on Facebook Marketplace for $50. A new kit costs about $190 right now, nearly triple what it did a year ago. I messaged her within minutes. She wrote back that someone had already offered $125. The market corrected her mistake in less time than it took me to type “Is this still available?” A few years ago, that listing would have sat for a day or two, waiting for someone like me.
I love a find. I once paid $3 for a pair of $150 jeans at a thrift store, and I still bring it up at dinner. Thrift stores were good. People were better. The best finds came from people who didn’t know what they had. Think of the guy selling a GPU for $150 when it was worth $350. Or Grandma, who couldn’t drive anymore and let her 15-year-old Camry, with 30,000 miles on it, go for $3,000 because she just wanted it out of the driveway. It was worth $10,000.
That kind of deal is gone, and I don’t think it’s coming back.
Greed didn’t kill it, and neither did inflation. It was the 30 seconds it now takes any seller to look up what something is worth. KBB is on every phone, and eBay’s sold listings are one search away. GPU sellers now post screenshots of comparable sales right in the ad. Even Goodwill pulls valuable donations for its own online auction site before they reach the shelf.
Here’s the part that stings: the money I used to pocket was Grandma’s money. Her $7,000. The GPU seller’s $200. I wasn’t finding value. I was profiting from someone else’s ignorance. The market got more efficient, and Grandma got her fair price. That’s good for the world and bad for people like me.
Some discounts survive. They’ve just changed shape. Today Grandma knows her car is worth $10,000. She might still take $8,500 in cash this afternoon to skip three weeks of strangers test-driving it. The old discount was 70%, the new one is 15. It no longer pays for what she doesn’t know. It pays for her time.
AI is now closing the gap from both sides. Sellers don’t even need to search, because an agent will price the item and write the listing. Buyers don’t need to be fast either. Agents are making that kind of thing cheap and universal.
So what’s left? The deal you earn rather than stumble onto. Speed still matters, but now it means having your own agent or you beating everyone else’s agent. The deals agents can’t touch are the ones that never get listed: the coworker clearing out his garage, the neighbor who’d rather sell to someone she knows. And sometimes, rarely, you meet a seller who knows exactly what something is worth and simply doesn’t care.
Deal hunting used to reward knowing more than the other person. Now everyone knows.
Note: The opinions are mine. Claude and Muse helped clean up the writing, the way an editor would. Fittingly, an essay about everyone having better information got a little help from AI.