Garage Sales

Today I went to a subdivision garage sale and found some good deals: a Garrison Keillor book for the Prince, a cross-stitch booklet for the Queen Mother, and a few much needed serving dishes to add the serving dish graveyard that is my cupboards. It was a fun interlude, and I came away with some hints for those who hold such garage sales. It might help you to pry more dollar bills from my tight-fisted hands:





10) Pricing a rusty, paint-peeling tea strainer for $1 and calling it an antique will not bring in many customers.

9) If you have only enough items for one table, and a person can still see the table underneath, that is probably not cause to label your sale a "big sale."

8) The oversize purple plate, made in China, with two huge chinks out of it, is probably not going to sell for $4.

7) Selling a ziploc baggy filled with hotel soaps for $2 is just cheesy and tacky.

6) A ziploc baggy of hotel shampoos? See number 7.

5) Not letting a customer look through the baggy full of baseball cards to see which ones are in there because "they're my son-in-law's cards, and if you touch them you will scratch them" is possibly not the best sales tactic to use to sell that baggy for $25.

4) The day you are going to have a garage sale in your driveway is not a good day to have your yard chemically treated.

3) When customers are perusing your items, chances are that is not the best time to complain loudly about previous customers to your neighbors.

2) Selling your used eye shadows for $1 is not sanitary and might cause customers to leave without looking at other items.

And the top piece of advice I could give, learned from my experience this morning:

1) If selling children's items, you will not increase your customer traffic by yelling, "Next time I'm gonna get a stripper pole and a beer wagon!" That is tacky, very very very tacky.

Happy garage saling!