What I Didn’t Know About Buying a Coffee Trailer (Until It Was Too Late)

Facebook Marketplace giveth, Facebook Marketplace taketh away.

I’m not sure what I imagined would be the hardest part of launching a mobile coffee business—but I can tell you what it wasn’t: finding the trailer. I’d casually browsed Facebook Marketplace for years, dreaming of my little coffee setup, and figured it would be easy. A quick search, maybe a couple test pulls, and boom—I'd be on the road with a shiny trailer in tow, ready to serve coffee with a smile and some Instagrammable string lights.

I was wrong.

What actually happened was a slow descent into the underworld of Facebook Marketplace, where logic, reason, and reliable communication go to die.

I spent hours—whole evenings—scrolling through listings while half-watching TV, chasing leads like I was solving a mystery. Some looked promising until I zoomed in and saw rust-covered shells. Others had no title or tags. And more than a few seemed like amazing deals… until the internet consensus flagged them as scams. (Yes, I almost fell for one. More than once.)

This is not what I ended up with, but I looked into about a million of these converted horse trailers. Photo by Yucel Moran on Unsplash