Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I must confess right away that I broke the cardinal rule of yard sales: I went shopping at my own family's yard sale. After all, the point of a yard sale is to get rid of this stuff, not simply move it around the family. But, hear me out first before you judge. As a new golfer, I don't have all the fun toys yet. There are tons of little gadgets and gizmos that the golf world makes you think you need when you're starting out. On the other side is my uncle, who's been golfing for years. He's got every toy you can think of, or in the case of a golf ball monogrammer, he's got 4 of every toy you can think of. I got a ball monogrammer, along with an electric club cleaner and one of those golf balls on a string that you can hit and it tells you how far it would have gone (by the way, of all these things are awesome). And, if I get sick of them by the fall, I'll simply add them to the next yard sale.
As for the rest of the crowd, I couldn't get over the vultures that stopped by this thing. Since this was my family's first yard sale, we were a bit discombobulated at the start. The sign said 10am - 1 pm, but we were still setting up tables at 10 am because of the rain. There were cars circling the block waiting for us to be done with setup. It was unbelievable. Even more surprising than the people who waited were the people who didn't. The first car drove by around 9 am, just trying to see if we had anything of value they could try and swoop in and nab before we officially started. Once we were up and running, there were a couple of notable characters, like the woman who spent 20 minutes going through all the old silverware we were trying to offload, but only wanted two or three specific spoons. Also the guy who tried to tell me that the linen set marked $10 was only marked as $2. Then again, most of the people that stopped were driving Audis, Lexuses and BMWs, so they clearly know something that I don't. After a huge flurry right when we started, when the pros were on the prowl, things slowed down to a normal pace the rest of the afternoon.
I think people got good deals from us. A big factor in this is the fact that my family is made up of people who want to buy really nice presents for each other, but also do not know how to haggle when it comes time to re-sell stuff. Also, we weren't looking to retire from the profits of the sales, we just wanted this stuff to not be cluttering up our homes anymore. So, if you stopped by you could get really nice stuff on the cheap. Most of the negotiations at the sale went like this:
Person, holding up item with the price clearly marked as $5:
How much is this?
Member of my family, fighting the urge to say, "Just take it":
Umm... $2.
Person, realising we're yard sale rookies:
Oh... Will you take $1?
Us, happy to have one less thing to put back in the garage:
Sure.
As for the stuff that I put up: we sold some of the videos, one of the VHS racks and I think one person looked at the fountain. But, there were people there asking for stuff that we didn't have (honestly, who expects Waterford to be sold at a yard sale?) and so I think it's appropriate to put up some yard sale thoughts from one of my favorite comedians, John Caparulo.
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| John Caparulo - Yard Sale | ||||
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