Garage Sales: Days of Rage

I LOVE garage sales!

I LOVE them!  LOVE LOVE LOVE them!  I love garage sales so much that I want to hold hands with them, make out with them, go all the way with them in the backseat, marry them in Vegas, have their babies, divorce them in Mexico in a huff and then marry them again on a very special episode of The Love Boat, with Captain Stubing presiding as the minister. 

I find the best shit at garage sales!  Ugly lava idols from Hawaii, vintage hampers, an end table that looks like a leaf.  Marvelous!

   

But as anyone who's ever been in love can tell you, it's only those you truly love who you can truly hate. So it's unavoidable that I also have some pretty wicked peeves about garage sales and the people who have them.  (I'm not alone in categorizing them, either -- check out the Yard Sale Queen for more crazy stories!) 

Thank all possible gods that the following list of peeves represents the exception and not the rule, because it might involve me busting out in a days of rage style massacre of all the cheapskate buttholes who offend me.  Locally, there is hope, as this lovely operation demonstrates, even offering tips about how to go about having a proper sale.  Hats off to Anna Shelander and all her associates!

Secondhand Nation's Official List of Garage Sale Bummers

1)  Presence of Mary Kay, Avon or any other direct-selling wares.   These all indicate a type of cheapness that I'm not interested in being near, lest I catch it.  Even if one likes Avon, Mary Kay or Pampered Chef shit, you know that the failed-salesperson-cum-garage-seller isn't going to give you a good deal;  he or she is going to try for one last gouge in order to recoup some of the lost dollars spent on the rip-off starter kit.

2)  The presence or mention of Beanie Babies.  'Nuff said.

3)  Lack of price tags or pricing guides.  It's fine if you have a tagboard sign with a list price for the type of item -- that's a life-saver for all-volunteer sales where the volume of junk is too high to have time to individually price -- but goddammit, man, give your customers something to work with at all!  We don't really want to have much back-and-forth with you, the seller, and some of us like to think that even if we are at a rummage sale, there are limits.  It's bad enough we're considering buying your mangy used AbRoller.  Let us preserve our dignity by not stooping to haggling and negotiation. 

4)  High Prices.  Listen, if your stuff is so great, sell it on eBay!  I don't come to yard sales with the fucking Franklin Mint in my purse.  I come with a pocket full of quarters if I'm just cruising, and never more than $50 (and that's only if I'm looking for furniture).  If you've got good stuff that's worth a lot to you, why are you selling it?  And if you don't need it/want it, have a goddamned estate sale.   Put in the time and effort to make it justifiable that I would pay $25 for a vase.  Otherwise, you're just a money-grubbing dumbass in a lawn chair.  Have fun making zero dollars!  Enjoy your drop-off donation trip to Goodwill!

5)  Christmas decorations.  Our planet is being choked by mega-tons of horrible Christmas decorations.  When tooling past a yard sale to determine if it's stop-worthy, nothing makes me hit the gas faster than a monster display of Christmas crap.  I see no end in sight to the Christmas Craze, as consumerism and Christmas go together like stockings and sugarplums.  So this peeve is obviously limitedly to my own preferences, which would be to never have to look at snarls of gold tinsel, plastic Jesus yard ornaments, snowmen made out of cotton batting or clothespin reindeer ever again.   

Comments

[Meghan]

I love, LOVE, L-O-V-E yard sales too. I wanna hug them!

[Secondhand Nation]

I know how you feel. I get so sad in the winter time and fantasize about living where it was warm all year round.

[Anna Shelander and the Upscale Sale, Minnesota]

Thanks for the nice reference to my garage sale tips published by the Star Tribune. I'm on the same page on so much of the buyer’s perspective shared! I'd like to add one important thing: that when walking into someone else's life (which is what we are really doing when we browse through another person's discards) please remember the art of diplomacy in your treasure hunting endeavors!

I'm more a buyer than a seller. And when I'm in the buying zone, I'm in the zone. But twice annually I'm a seller too, and when I encounter an entitled buyer, I feel he or she is defeating the goodness of this noble process.

The true star in this equation is the person who stayed up night after night pricing all this stuff. The star is the one who took extra time to organize clothing by size, to put up signs, to pay for advertising and possibly arranged kid care to make things happen. It would have been loads easier to have just dropped it all off at Goodwill or have Lupus PICK IT ALL UP. And those two options come with a potential tax benefit as well. Not so slick when you do it yourself.

No, the seller has made a choice to be doing a sale. And that choice, no matter the reason, should be respected. Even if I don't buy a thing, I complement them on their sale and reassure them that it's normal to have this much stuff, and that with the right buyer, it will sell.

Sure, I've made pity-purchases, where I feel so bad for the seller I buy something I absolutely don't need. But just because the seller took time, doesn’t mean they are owed my money. There’s more to a good sale from a buyer’s perspective than just being clean, and well-organized. Price is critical. I too feign Avon, and the Target clearance - unless it’s one piece and costs half the lowest marked price….

Which brings me to the “why” the choice was made to have a sale in the first place. If the sale is to sell out of greed, and to create ebay in your garage, using final auction figures to drive pricing, then the seller should close their garage door and get on line and sell on ebay. Ebay’s success depends on an audience of millions. Their garage sale might see a hundred.

If the “why” to sell is because the seller needs money quick, they should seek the cash from their friends instead of bringing complete strangers into their financial dilemma. You've walked into these sales yourselves - and the best way I can describe them is that they just don’t make sense. The seller's not there, or is in the shower, things are being sold out of boxes, the seller's pricing right behind you, a CD is $9.00 and a kitchen table is $2.00 (her sister has the chairs so you'll have to come back next week for those). The experience is so unnerving, I find myself locking my car remotely from inside the garage and checking and rechecking that I still have my purse.

In my humble opinion, the best sellers and the ones I dream about, don't NEED to be selling, rather they WANT to be selling!

This ideal Seller uses "tingle pricing" that makes you feel like you were just invited ("ssshhh") into the deal of a lifetime. They are selling only nice things that smell like they just were pulled from the dryer. These are the sales, like the one I’m involved in, where the goal of the sale is not to make a mint, but to transition ownership of the things they don't use anymore.

All our best on your blogging this topic. Garage/Tag/Yard/Estate sales are all a part of the Green Revolution. It's all good. And the fall season is just around the corner! Good luck, and Good hunting!

All our best, Your friends at www.myupscalesale.com

[Secondhand Nation]

I'm so glad you stopped by! I think you make wonderful points about the etiquette of the resale operations - something that certainly needs addressing.

Your comments on seller motivation are spot-on - eBay and Craigslist really have changed how quickly one can convert unwanted items into cash - but I think some people haven't tapped into those resources yet.

I'd love to hear more from you and how The Upscale Sale is going - I've heard so many good things about it and have got to trek out there and see for myself.

Thanks for stopping by!

[~Dawn]

I don't like the avon/marykay stuff either- no deals on those

I had one guy say that a specific xmas ornament was a rare one (disny one) and that he could get a better price on ebay but he'd sell to me for $5 (no box)- I declined and said, "Go ahead and sell it on ebay then."
I went home to check ebay for the price of that ornament and it wasn't going for over $3. Silly man!