Tony La Bella has a proposition for Craigslist users.

La Bella has owned La Bella’s Fine Foods, a catering and café business in Medford, Massachusetts, that the owner says needs a capital investment to get profitable again. So he’s put the whole business up for sale on Craigslist.

“Things are really slow. From where I am, it’s probably best to let somebody take it and see what they can do with it.”

He’s posted his business for sale at $30,000, a price that has garnered plenty of interest, but no real offers.

“I’ve already sold it 18 times,” he quipped, “but nobody has any money.”

La Bella’s is an extreme case of a trend across the country. Listings on the business category of Craigslist—which include everything from office supplies to entire businesses—have quadrupled nationwide in the last two years.

In the Boston area, where La Bella is located, such listings have doubled.

Craigslist’s overall traffic has grown steadily through the recession. In August 2009, the San Francisco-based online-classified marketplace saw 11.6 million more visitors than it saw in August 2008. The site’s 25.6 percent growth, compared with its traffic a year ago, vastly outstripped the Internet at large, where the number of monthly users grew by 4 percent in the same time frame.

For those without an insight into folkloric economic indicators such as men’s underwear sales or construction cranes on the Manhattan skyline, continued upswings in activity on Craigslist, where items go for fire-sale prices, may be a window into property owners’ distress—and buyers’ continued reluctance to pay full price.

On the other side of the Craigslist equation from La Bella, graphic designer Jessica Sutton has furnished most of her Fort Point studio with midcentury modern furniture bought on Craigslist. It’s a habit she picked up last year, when she was starting out in a smaller office in the Back Bay.

“I was just starting out, and I didn’t want to spend a lot of money,” she said. Now, bargain hunting has become her MO.

Craigslist doesn’t reveal the number of posts it sees daily, but the flood of offers could easily overwhelm any shopper. Sutton said she doesn’t have time to dig through the site itself—and she doesn’t have to. Boston blogger Keyse Angelo puts up her favorite picks on a Google-hosted blog she calls Crocodile Tears, at crocodiletears-keyse.blogspot.com.

Angelo, who on a typical day posts between 10 and 20 new furniture items, links to “sponsors” on her blog—but hasn’t gained any revenue. Most of the sponsors are friends who run their own businesses, she said.

Angelo, 29, said she and many people she knows won’t pay full price for nice things, with Boston’s second-hand market burgeoning and accessible through the Web.

“There’s so much stuff in the city, and there’s so much transition,” she said. “Students are coming and going; professionals are coming and going. There’s an abundance of furniture and clothes. There’s no need to go and buy new things.”