By Jim Hagarty
Maybe your experience has been different from mine, but for some reason I cannot explain, I can’t get rid of my junk by holding garage sales.
They obviously do the trick for other cluttermongers – some communities, in fact, pass bylaws limiting the number of yard sales a homeowner can have in a year because some are basically small businesses in disguise – but the few I’ve had have ended only in discouragement and embarrassment as I am continually forced to haul all the old stuff back into the garage.
It might be my prices. I’ll admit, greed gets the best of me and with visions of walking away with sagging pockets of freshly minted coins, I may be pricing myself out of the market. Maybe $10 is too much for a picture frame that cost $3 five years ago. And presentation could be a problem. I kind of just spread everything around loosely on the grass, on the driveway, in cardboard boxes, on a couple of old tables. It may be that I need to hire a marketing guru or business coach to help me catch the eye of those hard-nosed bargain hunters out there.
But the biggest drawback, I can easily see, has to be with my timing. It appears as though you cannot straggle out of bed at 9 o’clock on Saturday morning and start pricing and hauling your stuff to the street after that. The real, professional garage sale junkies have already ransacked the town by then and have gone to wherever these people hang out between garage sales.
Which might be the crux of the problem. I guess I am a stranger in the yard sale subculture. If you get offended by people wandering through your garage offering you a buck for things they’ve been clearly told are not for sale, then yard peddling might not be the thing for you. And putting an ad in the paper saying, “No early birds, please” just seems to serve to attract them.
You also cannot have sensitive feelings to be a success in the garage-sale world. When someone thinks 25 cents is too much to pay for an old flute and tries to work you down to 15 cents, you simply can’t take it personally. Accept that you are talking to an alien, take their 15 cents and move on, and see if they ascend to some sort of Mother Ship after they leave. In fact, if rudeness bothers you, don’t even think about exposing yourself to it by displaying the things you’ve been hoarding all these years. Your tender ears might be shocked at what you’ll hear.
But here’s the real rub. If everyone was as much a washout at this activity as you are, you might feel surrounded by compatriots. That, however, does not seem to be the case. A woman down the street announces proudly that she made $500 on her recent sale ($75 of which was yours). And an old friend from another town says he recently hauled in $950 at a blowout lawn sale.
Give me a break!
Two summers ago, my son and I sat patiently watching people glance at – and walk by – our pile of what might euphemistically be called rubbish on their way to a neighbour’s place two doors down. The couple there were doing a booming business and we watched with bewilderment at how everything they had for sale, sold, including all the stuff on this big, long table. And then, when they were packing up for the day, somebody came along and bought the table!
Last weekend, I put a few things out and amazingly, sold a couple of items. I leaned the bike I bought a few weeks ago for $10 up against a tree with a pricetag of $15 on it, hoping to launch a career as a capitalist. A woman pulled up in her car, got out and asked whether or not I’d take $10 for it as that is all she had on her. I said sure.
I also vowed never to do this again and have spent all week making deposits at the various charities around town as well as the dump where I probably should have been taking all this stuff all along.
