They Just Love to Buy Your Crap

I don't get it. I mean, I really don't. The attraction, the draw, the je ne se quoi that is the allure of human debasement that is the American Garage Sale. I don't get it on so many levels that I don't know if I am able to fairly dissect into the belly of the beast to determine what aspect of the whole experience sickens me the most, but dammit, for those of you out there who need this, I am willing to plunge head first into what I consider to be the lowest form of americana. Please bear with me. I bring this up because this past weekend, Kim embarked in another one of these nightmares with the neighbors, and I just don't get it.
The horror show that is the garage sale is not so much one thing. There are components from all angles that make it so impossible for me to understand this to be an acceptable thing to do on a perfectly good Friday and or Saturday and or Sunday. Good lord, the mere thought of a three day garage sale sends chills down my spine--uuuuggghh----focus Josh, focus, we can get through this together. OK, I am back. Where was I--oh, yes--the vast challenges one must overcome in order to put oneself through such an event. There are at least five areas that would prevent me from personally putting one of these things on. The planning, The Set-up, The Recognition of the Value of your Stuff, The People you Must Deal with, and The Clean-up. There is another factor at play here that is kind of mixed in with a couple of others and that is the fact that when one enters a negotiation environment, there must be a recourse for both parties. When you are selling your crap and the option is sell it to some jackass for a buck or haul it to the junkyard, the buyer tends to have the upper hand (especially as the sale draws to an end), but more on that later.
Let's start with the planning. I assume that one walks around their house, looks at all the piles of rubbish filling the shelves, closets, attics and garages and decides that donating them to the salvation army, goodwill, a museum for useless nostalia, or science would not be appropriate. Instead, let's pile all of the shit from our house and display it outside in our driveway and in our garage for a couple of days, so that the neighbors can rummage through it and realize what kind of losers live in the house down the road--genius. Not only is this a brilliant idea, but we can charge ridiculously low prices for these items and instead of getting a tax credit for the donation, we'll sell it for 5 cents on the dollar.
"Honey, how much do you want to charge for that stereo that you spent $350 on for my birthday?"
"I don't know, maybe $15 bucks--I'll try to get $20, but there is a scratch on the volume dial." "Cool."
So once you decide that you have enough clutter to dispose of, it's time to start the planning. You need to determine what weekend will be perfect to destroy, because there are several things to consider. First of all, it must be hot enough that by 9AM after the first wave of humiliation, you are so drenched in sweat that your odor causes would be negotiators to not even approach you unless they are committed to the purchase. This saves time and critical energy. The heat also leads to dehydration and delirium to assist you in those tough decisions when you need to pull out your best negotiating skills--you know, when one of the countless undocumented Mexican workers who come by, look through everything and offer $1 for any item, regardless of size, use, weight or value. After enough of these offers and the dizzying need for fluids sets in, you find a way to part with the never been used, still in the box, X-Box 360 with eight games for a dollar. It was just taking up space anyway, and you forgot that you spent $800 for the damn thing and were planning on giving it to your loving husband for Christmas this year. So the heat is an obvious and necessary component on the planning.
Then you have to invest in advertising. There is requisite signage necessary for all "successful" garage sales. The signs must lead the people with the cash to your front door and they must be cleverly placed to draw people in from areas that would not otherwise attend a local event such as yours. I recommend at least a ten mile radius with encouraging signs as you get closer. They should start out with standard "Garage Sale" with one of those impressive directional arrows. This will entice them to start the journey. Use a bright color, but don't go with those orange and black signs that everybody else uses. Yours need to be a shocking color that doesn't blend in--Fuscia will suffice. This way, our unusecting prey will not be detoured by other garage sale signs as they make their way to your doorstep. After three or four miles, start putting "You're almost there" on the signs or "You've come this far, don't turn around now." and finally, "Don't be a sap. You're going to want to punch me in the throat for making you drive this far. Just a few more blocks!" This should provide the proper incentive for the potential buyers. The trick is that when they do finally arrive, you have so many of these dolts in your yard at the same time that they immediately forget that they really do want to punch you in the throat, and instead are forced to hurry up and find the "hidden gems" that we all know are submerged beneath the miles of miscellany displayed in your yard. We call this "creating demand." in the garage sale bizness.
You also need to make sure to advertise in the newspapers, because there just aren't enough good garage sales around and you need to make sure that everybody who actually can read has the opportunity to find your house first thing in the morning. The ability to read leads to the ability to hold a job and in turn, the ability to make a living. This living is what leads to them having the disposable income necessary to offer $2 to $3 for those items that you paid $100 for just last spring. These are the type of people that you want to flood the street. You never know when the vast array of cars lining the street will yield one of those unsuspecting, never actually been to a garage sale people who doesn't get the whole negotiating environment and will pay the price you tell them the first time. When you have one of these consumers, your job as a garage salee is to guide them to the best items and make sure they feel that they got great deals at every turn. It is important to steer them away from the full-time junk mongers who are busy offering a quarter for that ming dynasty vase that just doesn't match your drapes anymore.
Enough about the planning. The Set-up is almost as much fun as the planning, so if you're still on board, let's delve into that aspect, shall we? You want to make sure that you devote at least two full days to a garage sale. The first day, you get your finger on the pulse of your shopping pool and can make necessary adjustments in your pricing strategy, your marketing techniques and at what time to release the dogs to chase away the riff-raff when it gets too uncontrollable. The second day also gives you the opportunity to display things in a different fashion based upon the items that were moving well. There is a lot of strategy involved. I recommend the Friday/Saturday combination because you want to have access to the workers who are building houses in your neighborhood and they all work on Friday.
Make certain that you realize that your desire to get this thing up and running by 8AM in no way makes any sense to those would be purchasers who see you setting up at 6:45. Most likely, your driveway will be filled with loonies by 7:15 while you are busy pulling out tables, spreading out old bikes and carrying retired furniture to its proper place. Some guy is already asking you how much for those dusty old Beatles records that have never even been opened. Knowing that your husband would be so excited that you finally found some poor sap who would actually buy those things (especially that silly one made out of white vinyl--how gay is that?) because nobody actually has a record player anymore, you tell him $5 for the whole thing and he actually accepts--sucker born every minute. Wait until that dumb spouse of yours hears about that transaction. He didn't even know that you put those old records in a milk crate at the bottom of the driveway. He'll just be so thrilled that there is finally that extra space in the house. Who knew that some guy would not only take away all of those stupid Beatles records, but he took all the other ones off our hands too, and now we have enough cash to buy doughnuts today. These are the kind of early morning tragedies that can be averted by proper set-up technique.
The key is staging. Empty your vehicles from the garage and driveway the night before and get everything that is going out for this grand event into the garage and onto its proper table. In the morning (at least an hour before you actually plan to open) be ready to go. Convince your spousal equivalent that he or she needs to help you get everything outside and set-up first thing. Once the sun is up, you are too late. You will be inundated with those sons of bitches who want to steal from you blind. You've got to be set-up before they arrive. If you are still carrying out major items when the first couple of cars roll up, you will never catch up. It always starts with good intentions, but before you've tagged every pair of socks and coloring book, it goes horribly wrong. Once that garage door opens, you had better be ready for operations. Have somebody who is just setting up and have somebody else who is just dealing with customers. Trying to do both is a recipe for disaster.
The hardest thing to come to grips with is Recognizing the Value of your Stuff. I would literally rather douse an item with kerosene, light it up and watch it burn in front of that asshole who just offered me $5 for my digital camera than to let him have it or to give him a counter offer. If he is offering $5 and you paid $350 for it and expect to get $75-$100, you are never going to get close. There is no point in making a counter offer at this point, because no matter how high this clown goes, he isn't reaching your selling point. I don't think it is so much nostalgia or a sense that my things are better than that, but I have a lower threshhold of what I am willing to do and where I am willing to go with my pricing scheme. For Kim, it is just a very simple matter. She wants all of the excess collateral out of the house. The more they buy, the less she has to put back or throw away. There is nothing else to it. For me, I just can't justify giving away perfectly good items to some jerk just because I don't use it anymore. It must be a principle thing. I would gladly give it to a friend or a family member for free--in fact, we usually pay the shipping to get clothes and other assorted items to people all over the country, but watching somebody offer me some humiliating amount of money when I know damn well that it is worth twenty times the amount he is offering, I just can't do it.
In order to be successful at these freak shows, you must recognize that what you think something is worth doesn't necessarily translate into what somebody is willing to pay for it. You must clearly state your objective prior to starting. If your objective is to make some money and that is your only objective, you can be a little pickier about pricing. If your objective is to try to get anything for a bunch of rubble that was going to the dumpster the next day anyway, you need to accept that fact and take whatever you can get. Let's face it, The City of Frisco garbage collecting division isn't exactly stapling envelopes of $20 bills to your trash receptacle after they find some great stuff in your barrel. If you are planning on throwing something away anyway, you need to take what you can get. This doesn't mean that you have to take every offer and it doesn't mean that every item has to have the same strategy, just recognize where each item fits into the grand scheme of your plan. Let's say you have that digital camera that still works great, still has the instruction manual, software and connections to the computer and you don't use it anymore, but it isn't really taking up much space. Set a threshhold for the price and don't go below it. You don't have to throw it away like you might with those four hundred coloring books that have Hunter scrawled across the cover of each one (those, you might have to take what you can get or throw them in with each frame purchased). You just need to know what each thing is doing at the garage sale. There are definitely people who come to these things willing to spend some cash on higher end items. They are still getting a bargain, but just make sure you don't turn your back and let somebody who doesn't know your strategy negotiate that item for your. Otherwise that sweaty, wrinkled $5 bill is the only memory you will have for that $350 camera.
If I had to choose the one area that I am just unable to get beyond when it comes to the garage sale phenomenon, it has to be The People you Must Deal with. This is the hurdle that I cannot come to grips with under any circumstance. I don't go to flea markets, I don't hang around swap meets, and I don't go to garage sales. I'm not saying that everybody who goes to these places is a dreg of society (I don't know if dregs can be singular or not, but this is still my blog and for my purposes, you can have a dreg). That being said, these are not the social circles that I like to frequent. If you want to call me an elitist, snob, debutante or any other appropriate term at this point, I am perfectly comfortable with the moniker. There are a lot of wonderful people who come to the garage sales who are very nice, friendly, fresh smelling--you know, human. The vast majority of the true garage sale shoppers, however, are battling to see whether they have more cash in their pockets or teeth in their mouths. Suddenly, you are welcoming them into your house (well, not all the way in, but certainly onto your driveway and into your garage) to look through your things and get into arguments with you about how nobody in their right mind would pay more than $2 for that bike and that you'd be crazy not to take it. The smell emanating from them is usually enough to convince you to let them take whateve they want if they just promise to leave. But you know that there will just be more of them with fewer teeth and a more palpable odor as the day progresses. It just goes downhill from the first encounter. Suffice it to say, I'm not a huge fan of the folks who darken your driveway during one of these events.
Finally there is the cleanup phase of the process. This might be the most depressing part of the day. Generally, all of the stuff that you really wanted to get rid of still manages to make its way back into the garage. Some of the stuff will make its way to goodwill (where it should have gone in the first place), some of it will make its way back into the house where it will collect dust until the next garage sale, and some of it will mercifully find its way to the refuse pile. What I really love is when you do a neighborhood garage sale and your kids keep coming home with more of the neighbor's crap, knowing full well that the money you just made selling your junk just went to acquiring more useless crap from somebody else. So, after two days of toiling in hell against the elements, against the swarms of subhumanity and against what should be your better judgment, your exhaustion manifests itself in the cleanup phase. There are the inevitable arguments about why the hell we couldn't sell the kids board games, because somebody refused to replace the missing dice or how we ended up with more kids clothes than we started with because I sure as hell never saw that hooded sweatshirt before. It goes on and on.
After the cleanup is completed, it is time to go and count the smelly, sweaty $1 bills like you are some sort of adult dancer who doesn't make out really well on the lap dances, but can work a pole like a superstar. Hopefully you are pulling the cash out of a pocket, lock box or one of those fancy fanny packs that Gramma G used to love(she still might actually) instead of your garter belt or g-string. You pile it high on the counter to discover you have made $134 of pure profit for just two days of absolute torture.
Now in the example from this weekend, I must admit that our neighbors actually had a really profitable event. Brad and Stacy made over $900 selling everything you could imagine, so even I would have to call that a success. Kim and the kids certainly didn't have that kind of a weekend, but Lauren had a couple of bucks and lots of new toys and coloring books from the neighbors' treasure trove. Hunter made a little bit of coin, which I am certain he will parlay into a new game for his DS before too long. We've still got a garage full of Shari's clothes that she insisted on transporting out here for the big event. Having lost nearly 60 pounds so far this summer, she has a few items to get rid of and instead of dropping them off at goodwill (about five minutes from work), she lugged all of her crap out here 1200 miles away so they could sit in front of the neighbors house for two days and return to our garage where I expect them to stay in perpetuity. I cannot wait until the big spring event. We're going to make a bundle.