September 9, 2023
CURB ALERT Two Free Toilet Tanks
For the past couple of months, we’ve been doing a DIY renovation of the main bathroom in our house.
We took the whole room down to the studs, so everything from floor to ceiling was rebuilt or replaced.
Including the toilet.
So a couple of months ago, we went potty shopping.
After some online research, we ordered a TOTO Drake toilet from Costco for $399.
It’s a two-piece design, so the tank and bowl were supposed to be shipped separately to us.
We got the tank pretty quickly, but the bowl never arrived.
We called Costco and they said, “Sorry about that! We’ll ship you a whole new toilet. Don’t worry about shipping the tank you received back to us.”
Fair enough.
A week or so later, TWO boxes arrived. One said TANK, and one said BOWL.
Success!
We left them sitting in the boxes until yesterday when it was time to do the installation.
We opened the boxes, and... Surprise! The bowl was broken in half.
Grrrrrr...
Rather than spend one more day without a toilet in our main bathroom, we raced over to Lowes and bought a completely different - and completely intact - toilet, which was successfully installed later that day.
Hooray!
But check it out...
This adventure left us with two perfectly good, new-in-box, pristine Drake toilet tanks.
Depending on where you shop, these retail for about $169 USD but they’re worthless to me.
We bought a different brand of toilet, so there’s zero chance we’ll ever need one of these things as like a replacement or something.
But... I couldn’t quite bring myself to just throw them in the dumpster.
So I put them on Craigslist as a CURB ALERT, which historically has always been very successful for us.
Typically, our curb alerts disappear within an hour.
Not this time.
Why?
Because there’s no demand for JUST a Drake toilet tank.
It’s like trying to sell JUST a left shoe.
The only person on planet Earth who might consider these things worth the drive would be someone who just broke the tank on their existing Drake toilet.
Turns out, that’s not a big market.
Here’s the thing...
This is a great example that cost doesn’t dictate value.
I’m sure it costs TOTO real money to manufacture and ship Drake tanks.
BUT!
A Drake tank WITHOUT a Drake bowl is WORTHLESS.
Yours,
—J