My almost 8 years old Gigabyte Aero 15x left me last week, and I found myself suddenly in need of getting another laptop. Since my finances are a bit tight nowadays, I went looking for some used Thinkpads on eBay.
I’ve never really used eBay before, but there are so many Thinkpads for sale, and those are sturdy machines that can get a beating. Also I’ve always wanted to get a Thinkpad. And so after a few days of going through listings I spotted one that looked promising. I might not be that good at eBaying, but this one was selling 5 pieces of the same exact laptop’s model. It had photos of it in a cardboard box, with the cord of the charger all coiled up nicely on the side of the machine. The computer itself looked perfect. The seller had few reviews but all good, and the last one was from someone that bought one of the exact same laptops I was looking at, and described it as “perfect”.
I’m not quite sure what’s going on behind the scenes here, but my idea is that there are so many big offices and businesses that open and close in London that there’s a lot of office supplies that go for sale on eBay or similar websites. So I thought I was gonna get a machine that had been barely used by some marketing guy staring at a spreadsheet all day, barely touching the keyboard, or something on these lines. The price was a little above what I was planning to pay for it but it looked like a good deal after all.
I pulled the trigger and ordered the laptop.
The shipping was super fast and a couple of days later I was unboxing the Thinkpad. My first impression was that they put a lot of effort into cleaning the laptop and preparing it all for shipping. I turned it on and they have installed and updated Windows 11, which was gonna be nuked very soon to make room for Arch Linux for me, but nonetheless I could see the care with which they prepared the machine, and I appreciated it. Until I noticed on the left border signs of usage: the black finish was eroded by the constant friction of a left hand, and I could see a bit of shiny metal along the edge.
I turned around the machine and on the bottom-front there were some very deep scratches, as if the laptop had been dragged on the street, or it survived a car accident…I wasn’t pleased. Nonetheless I tested the hardware and the rest was perfect, I decided that it was good enough, that life was too short to complain about scratches, and proceeded to erase the SSD to install my OS of choice. It’s a great little machine, a Thinkpad X1 Carbon gen 9, with some great hardware compatibility for Linux. It’s incredibly light and sturdy. I like it.
After a couple of days I received an email from eBay that was reminding me leave some feedback on my recent purchase. And that’s when it hit me:
although I was happy with the laptop, I couldn’t shake off myself the feeling of having been treated with a bit of dishonesty. Specifically, the listing didn’t mention in any way any kind of scratches, minor or major, it only described the machine’s specs. Neither did the photographs, that showed clearly another laptop from mine (no sign of usage on the left front) and never showed the bottom of it anyway. And I paid a little extra because I thought it was in such a good shape.
Put in front of having to give feedback on the purchase I felt like writing to the seller to complain about it. I told him I could see the care with which they prepared the machine and shipped it, but I’d have liked to know of those nasty scratches before pulling the trigger on my purchase.
He sent me a message (with several autocorrect mistakes that he didn’t fix) with some kind of apology, and since that was the last laptop he had of that model, he offered me £50 back as a compensation for the scratches, or, if I’ve preferred, wait a few days since he’d got more laptops incoming next week and he could replace mine. I went on his page, and there was still one of the same exact models listed for sale!
You see where I’m going here. I told him that since he didn’t like to tell things straight I wasn’t gonna trust him with “another laptop, maybe someday next week”, and if I was to give a price to a compensation it was more towards £100. He started sending me screenshots of his conversation on Whatsapp with his “supplier”, where he was asking for another laptop because mine was scratched and his “client” (myself) wasn’t happy. I let him be, and then in the evening I received a call.
It was the seller, who offered me another model, in his view an upgrade, for a bit more money. I told him I was gonna hang, and that I wanted to have this conversation on eBay, to keep it on the records. The guy started to sound kinda desperate, I told him how I felt about not knowing of the scratches before sending him the money, and he apologised and told me that he could offer me £70 back and that that was his whole gaining on the sell so he couldn’t do more.
I mean, we were bargaining for a price. He offered me £50 back, I asked for £100. I was willing to get down to £75, he offered me £70, and I accepted. He then started to blabber, calling me “bro” and asking me not to leave any review, please. Please bro! This is a practice as old as the world I think. But somehow this morning I couldn’t help but feeling bad about it. I felt like the guy leveraged my emotions to bargain, and I hated it.
When I started writing this, I was aiming towards an ending about how capitalism is making us all bad people, struggling to survive and careless of one another. I realise now that, (although my argument against capitalism is still valid) I can see my experience with the eBay seller just as haggling for a price. But still I’d rather buy from a store, pay a premium, have a warranty and a brand new machine, if and when possible. But mostly I’d rather not have to bargain for prices with shady people. It’s fucking 2025 and I’m getting too old for this shit.
In the end, I’m happy with my Thinkpad, and maybe I learned something from the experience, and I guess this is my feedback on the purchase, after all.