Why I Love My Buy Nothing Group (Part 1)
a unconventional Valentine
Alright friends, I’m splitting this post into 2 parts because it turns out, I have a lot to say about this little Facebook group! I’m also including a warning at the top that this post contains more profanity than is typical for me, but hopefully you can forgive me, times being what they are.
I Don’t Usually Do This
If you’ve read this newsletter before, you know that passionate essays about Community are not my usual beat. Usually I write goofy, loosely edited listicles about cantaloupe or being Gen Z. But FOR NO REASON IN PARTICULAR, I felt like getting on my tiny soapbox about one of the only good things* to ever come from my regrettable, extensive use of Facebook: Buy Nothing.
What is Buy Nothing?
If you aren’t familiar with Buy Nothing, It’s exactly what it sounds like. Buy Nothing groups are local internet forums, almost exclusively on Facebook - where people who all live in the same neighborhood post items to give away and ask for items to receive. Users look up the affiliate group closest to them, verify they live in the designated radius, and then that’s it - they can get to posting. You can ask for or give away basically anything - just no alcohol, weapons, or live animals. And no swapping or asking for compensation, either. It has to be a true gift. The national group refers to Buy Nothing a “gift economy”, but truly it’s not that different from a yard sale, or thrifting, or Facebook Marketplace -- except crucially, everything is free.
To give you an idea of how this works, here’s a quick rundown of some of my favorite posts I’ve seen from the last two and a half years participating in this group:
The woman who posted a bottle of spicy lube with the caption “My downstairs neighbor gave this to me with instructions to ‘go start a family’. Since that’s not happening, does anyone want this?”
The guy who posted a half-eaten pizza saying, “We were going to eat all of this but my roommate got a date and flaked last minute - anybody want half a pizza?”
The guy who made a long post asking for holiday-specific tchotchkes with which to prank his long-distance friend, who apparently hates things like Christmas tea towels and Arbor Day wine glasses. He wanted to gather enough holiday trinkets to be able to mail one to his friend on each holiday for an entire year.
The woman who posted asking for a gift of service - she had broken her leg and wanted to know if someone would be able to shovel her walk for her. Another woman in the comments replied, “I’m sending my teenage son and his friends over to your house right now. They’re annoying me anyway!”
The Magic
It doesn’t stop there, though. I saw someone on Instagram say that when you join a Buy Nothing, it feels like things suddenly start to appear “as if by magic”. Buy Nothing invites us into a bold worldview that’s right there in the name. It explicitly encourages users to be bold in their asks, and generous in their offers. I once posted asking if anyone had a play kitchen they wanted to give away; two hours later I was loading a beautiful, barely-used play kitchen in the back of my car. I saw somebody made a post asking if anyone had green paint samples. My mom and I had just painted my bathroom green, and we had a ton of green paint samples laying around collecting dust. They were whisked away off my porch an hour later.
Once, someone just posted simply asking if anyone had food to give. That post was overwhelmed with replies - neighbors inviting him to join them for dinner, others offering to leave food on their porch if he wanted to be alone, still others inviting him to look through their pantry or freezer and take anything he wanted. Other comments offered to give him a lift to the food bank, or gave directions to the nearest community fridge.
The underlying philosophy is -- if you need something, hell, if you WANT something, there’s no harm in asking. I’ve seen people give away TV’s and refrigerators, or ask to borrow power tools and lawn mowers, or ask if someone could show them how to use their new sewing machine. The vast majority of the time, their calls are answered.
And it’s not just young, idealistic people who think they invented secondhand shopping and are doing this for Important Leftist Reasons (cough). We’ve got middle aged crafters and gardeners and textile artists, broke college students who are always moving in and out, parents of young children looking for clothes and toys and books, parents of older children who are giving those things away, and plenty of people who don’t seem to share my politics but DO share my desire not to pay through the nose for every goddamn thing.
It all begs the question, what if we really could buy nothing? What if everything we need is already here?
stay tuned for part 2, coming tomorrow
*The 2 other good uses of Facebook a) seeing what my brother posts (he is a master of the form) and b) using my super spy detective skills to determine if an old classmate has gotten married and mentally ranking how much I liked her wedding dress on a scale of 1-10