Ok, garage sale veterans, I need your help. I have a bunch of junk to get rid of, and a vacation to finance, so that means only one thing: headaches. No, no, a garage sale.
Any advice for a newbie? I know to price low to move the merch, but other than that I am clueless.
How do you get people there? what helps items sell? Around here they tend to be Fri and Saturday. Do people really come on Friday?
Foe one thing, advertise it on Craigslist. If you have any high-value items such as electronics, list them and consider taking pictures and making ads for the individual items.
Do you have books? That’s something I look at for garage sales. People here write their yardsale signs on the bottom of boxes and then use rocks to hold their signs upright. (small side of box filled with rocks and the bottom showing to the road). If I only see “Yardsale” on the box, I might not go look. If I see “Yardsale, kitchen stuff, kids stuff, books…etc” I’ll drive a couple of blocks to look at it.
Have at least two people working the sale. One person does the cash, and the other person keeps the merchandise from sprouting legs. Put the more valuable stuff near the person working the cash. Three people is even better. Hit the bank on Wednesday or Thursday, and get plenty of singles (or dollar coins) and at least one roll of quarters. More is better. You’ll get people who claim not to have anything smaller than a twenty or fifty or hundred, in hopes that you’ll just give stuff away. Tell them that they’ll have to wait for you to accumulate some cash for change, or they can go run and get change.
If you want to haggle, set the prices a bit higher. You can always come down. However, if you set the prices too high, you run the risk of people just passing stuff up. Also, if someone is taking a large and/or relatively high priced item, and is wavering about more items, it’s time to bargain. Give them a discount if they take a lot of stuff. Also, plan on drastically discounting everything on Sunday afternoon.
Don’t hold anything for more than a couple of hours, IF you hold anything at all. People will exclaim that something is just absolutely perfect, and they want to get their spouse or more money and they’ll be right back. Nine times out of ten, that’s the last time you’ll see them. It’s best to tell people that the first person who pays for the item is the one who gets to go home with it. Hold stuff ONLY if it’s been 100% paid for. If it’s paid for, put it in the house, with a note on it saying who it belongs to.
I advise dealing in cash only, no checks. And you should know where the nearest ATM is.
YOU get to set the hours. People will come ring your doorbell at an ungodly early hour. If you’re an early bird, go ahead and start at 7 AM. If you’re not, I’d say to disconnect the doorbell the night before. You WILL get people who want you to wake up at 6 AM and drag your stuff out early. Then they’ll want a discount.
You don’t have a public restroom. Don’t let anyone into your house. Have a working outlet so people can plug stuff in, but the only people who go into your house are the ones who live there, or your friends. It’s best to lock up the house, in fact, because people WILL wander into it.
Remember that the goal is not to really make money (you won’t) but to make space. You are selling your old junk, which has very little value. If it does have value, you should be selling it some other way. You will only be making money in the sense that you’re not throwing the stuff away. If you have high value items, yes, make individual ads for those items.
I’ve had a ton of sales. The above advice is all good.
I never sell anything for less than $1. If the item really isn’t worth a dollar, don’t fool with it in a garage sale. Toss it, donate it, or put them in a larger lot of the same. I used to know someone who laboriously priced things at 5c, etc. Not worth the effort.
If you don’t have exact change for customers, that’s their problem, not yours. Let 'em squirm, they’ll “find” it most of the time.
Carefully watch valuable and tiny things like pocket knives, tools, etc. I’ve had things like that stolen when I least suspected. These thieves work in crowds.
Put up some simple effective signs. Free to make usually with a little creativity and forethought. And PLEASE TAKE THEM DOWN when you are through.
Don’t keep a cash box. Keep all your money in your pocket and get rid of the extra if you need to.
Don’t set out tables, clothing racks, etc- too much hassle. Just mark off territory on the ground with chalk and mark a price on the area.
No need for fancy signage- nobody cares about your address, days or hours, or knows the name of the streets in your neighborhood, etc. Just get a few to several 8x11 inch pieces of paper or construction paper or cardstock and write “garage sale” on them. When you drive to the several intersections near you to hang the signs, take your magic marker and draw an arrow on the sign before you hang it. When the sale is near over, drive around again and take the signs down.
If you want to sell the thing for 50 cents, put it in the dollar area. If you want 3 dollars for it, put it in the 5 dollar pile.
Things that sell well around here: tools, garden items, kitchen items, baby stuff.
If you live near a Sam’s or Costco or Walmart and it is hot in your area, consider and ice chest and selling water and soda for twice or so what you paid for it. If you have leftovers, they are free to you- paid for by the selling of the extra!
I had a yardsale once and had tons of my daughter’s toddler-sized clothes and small toys. I had a bag sale. The customer could either pay the price for each single item or they could buy a bag for $5 and whatever they could stuff in the bag was theirs. Stuff went quickly and I made a ton of money.
Garage sales are,at the moment,my main source of income. Do not price low,especially with books and tools.
If you are gonna be open only Friday and Saturday,Friday will bring twice as much as Saturday,probably more.Thursday would be your best day by a long shot if you decide to open that day.
To get people there,use BIG signs that are easily readable and put them at least 50 yards away from your driveway.
This is good advice,people do steal,watch closely.
This is not,if someone wants you to hold an item get a down payment and ask them when they will be back.If they dont come back within the specified time put it back out for sale and the down payment goes in your pocket.
I have taken dozens of checks and never had a problem.
Agreed
I am in it to make money and I do very well.
5 10 or even a quarter is a waste of time,but i sell toys,matchbox cars,McDonalds toys and what not for 50 cents and do very well.
Make sure your signs are readable from a distance.
One rainy day I had to close the garage door against the wind so I wrote a big “Open” sign and put it on the outside of the overhead garage door and had people use the side door. It was my best garage sale day ever. Apparently all the other sale hosts wimped out with the weather and the bargain hunters needed to buy something. I really scored.
Don’t.
Not exactly the advice you were looking for, I presume.
If you insist on having a garage sale, there’s a lot of good advice in this thread. In this area, Thursdays are the day for serious garage sale shoppers, Fridays are busy and Saturdays are deadsville.
Mark the prices on your merchandise clearly. I won’t buy something if I have to go track down someone to tell me the price. If you don’t price each item, make sure those who are helping you know which pile the item came from.
I believe in “merchandising”. Make the stuff look good to your buyer. If it looks like junk then your buyers will not likely buy it. For example, if you have linens to sell, bundle them with a pretty ribbon and a nice price tag. Clean your stuff up a little if it’s been stored in a dirty place. As you’re setting up, think like you’re a buyer…what would you like to see displayed and how.
And lastly, good luck. Every single time I have a garage sale I swear I will never have another one. Every 5 years or so we seem to collect enough junk that I can’t justify taking to Goodwill so I do it again. Last one raised $700 so it’s not bad for a few days work.
If you go this way, realize that you are not going to sell to anyone who isn’t in great shape. I have mobility and balance issues, I am NOT going to stoop and paw through stuff on the ground. If the merchandise isn’t convenient for me examine, I’m not going to bother. If I saw a garage sale with books and clothes and such piled on the ground, I wouldn’t even stop for it, I’d just drive on by.
Now, if you’re selling furniture or fairly large appliances, that’s one thing. But there are a lot of people with bad backs and bad knees, but deep wallets.
Be nice to people who drive up. I don’t know if the world has changed or what, but I hit some garage sales for the first time in ten years the other weekend, and every time I walked up to one the owner was talking on the phone or otherwise ignored me. People stay longer if they feel welcome, and when people stay longer they buy more.
Thursday is the Big Opening Day for the week for Garage Saleing. Saturday by noon, you won’t get alot of people.
Merchandising your items is important, to me. If you have a couple of tables, set up a housewares table, clothing table and whatever else ( all the same kinda stuff) table.
If you toss your clothing on the ground in heaps, as I’ve seen at one garage sale for chaldeans, I won’t even bother. If you don’t bother, why should I?
Don’t over mark your clothing. It won’t sale. Keep everything, including coats and formals, under $2. ( I work for a Salvation Army. This is garage sale season. We are getting the crap that doesn’t sell at the sales. Clothing is #1 and the tags( $10.00) are still on it and we laugh.
If you paid $300 for that coach bag, you are are not selling it at a garage sale for $60. Maybe $10. Deal with it and move on.
Lock up your purse and wallet in your house and lock your house up, especially if you Craigslist.
Decide: Do you want to make money or get rid of stuff? You can’t do both.
I’m surprised to hear so many of you saying Thursday and Friday are big garage sale days. I only ever see signs up for weekend sales around here.
Most of this advice is great stuff.
Make the signs bright and visible, with an arrow pointing the way. If you can get away with big enough signs to add some details like “baby items” or “books” or “furniture”, you’ll probably get more people stopping in. Get an ad onto Craigslist and maybe your local Pennysaver or small local paper. The biggest and best yard sales are usually ones where you get a handful of neighbors to join you and make it a “community yard sale”, because people like shopping at several yard sales at once.
I find that there are two ways to set up your merchandise - you can group it by price or group it by category. Or if you’re really ambitious, both. The plus side of arranging tables by price is that you won’t need to tag every single item. For the cheaper stuff, like small kids toys, you can put them in a plastic bin with a 4 for 1$ label on it. If your goal is to make space in your house, as opposed to making money, you can put up signs like “Books $1 - buy three get one free” to help encourage people to take more.
Only sell things that are clean and in decent shape. When I pull up to a sale and the first things I see are dusty and chipped, I usually don’t bother checking out the rest of it.
Selling water or soda and snacks is a good idea too - this works especially well if you have kids to run the snack table.
If you don’t have gold, silver, and jewelry, you can mention that in your Craigslist add. That will cut down (but not eliminate) the number of people who come by just to see if you are selling gold, silver, and jewelry.
There are people who use their cell phones to look up the going rate of each book, and then pick and choose the ones that are worth more than what you are selling them for. I’m fine with this, because I just want to get rid of the stuff and am too lazy to list them online. But if you care, you might want to check your books out before hand and make sure you are pricing accordingly.
I always had a box of free stuff out at the curb - stuff that was really worth very little, but I didn’t want to just throw out.
One time I had a good friend who wanted to sell some stuff, but couldn’t be there the whole time. He put a five digit number on the sticker for each one, next to the asking price. It was a code that, with very simple math, I was able to tell what his absolute minimum was for that item.
You’ll be amazed at what you can sell. A friend of mine had a spare part to something…I forget exactly what. She was clearing out stuff because we had just been laid off from our old jobs, and she hadn’t found anything yet. A guy came by just browsing, saw the spare part, and exclaimed that he had been looking all over for that exact model part.
-D/a
Around here, Friday is the big day. A lot of people will do a late Thursday from 4-7 but I don’t see the advantage. Fridays are busy. Saturdays are somewhat less so but you get more families who will do things like slowly go through the clothes and buy a heap, or buy bags full of toys. Friday I usually sell the big items like furniture, and most of the high-value items, but Saturday’s nice to whittle down the pile that goes to Goodwill. The bargain hunters all come Friday, maybe early Saturday if there aren’t a lot of other sales. I never bother with Sunday. I do a full day Friday and usually about a half day on Saturday. By lunchtime or so, people are usually pretty scarce.
Don’t hesitate to say no to a haggle if you don’t want to. The pros will rush through right away. If they hem and haw and say oh, that’s way too much for that table, but it’s right after you opened, smile and say you’ll take their number and call them if you don’t get a better offer. Unless it’s more about getting rid of junk and less about money, of course.
Price everything clearly. Borrow tables – people don’t like to rifle through boxes. Stuff at table level sells. Move stuff to empty spaces on tables and into sight – people will drive by if things look picked over. Price things at even numbers (nothing lower than 25 cents). Grouping similar items together is a good idea. For example, I had a bunch of beauty products (sealed). Rather than trying to sell a whole bunch of little things, I just grouped them into plastic kitchen bags. They all sold.
In terms of advertising, I have a good location near major streets so I just did signs and Craigslist, and I got a ton of people. Don’t put too much on the sign, and make sure they have clear arrows at each intersection.
I have had thieves come through. Honestly, I don’t care enough about my garage sale stuff to have a person there specifically to watch for them. One person got away with about 6 VHS tapes from about 1990. Oh, no. Anything higher-value just goes on the checkout table. An extra hand is good, certainly, especially if it rains and you need to get stuff inside quickly, and to periodically check signs, but I don’t see the point in treating people like criminals. Honestly, if you need stuff so bad you’re stealing from a garage sale, yeesh, just take it.
Make people comfortable. A canopy to get away from the sun was a popular lingering spot – I’d keep moving items in there, and they’d sell. Nobody wanted to go even 10 feet away into my enclosed patio so I kept moving stuff out of there. I also had drinks available. Don’t hassle people and let them look - a friendly hello is fine, but don’t stare. Keep grocery bags for a few weeks for people to take their stuff away. Also, move your car so any rockstar parking spots are free to use for people stopping.
Have something to do! While I was genuinely busy for most of the time – I think I had at least one person shopping all day on Friday – people feel weird if you’re not occupied and they’ll rush through. Have a book, a game, play with your phone, whatever.
You’ll get a few pushy idiots. It’s your sale. I don’t mind saying no, or my favorite is “well, that’s not mine, so I’ll only take the price on the sticker”. I was genuinely selling a lot of stuff for others, but I used this a few times with morons who wanted huge discounts because there was a scratch or something (uh, it’s used, that’s why it’s priced the way that it is). For the most part, pushy people will take the deal anyway.
Don’t be afraid to reprice if stuff doesn’t move.
I love my friend’s garage sales. There’s no looking on the items for the prices. All shirts are $1, jackets are $3, books are a quarter, jeans are $3 (she has good stuff). Collectibles are grouped by category and are all the same price. The only thing she prices individually is furniture and appliances.
Something that bugs me at garage sales are when prices are written on the item. A collector might want to re-sell the item, but they can’t, if you’ve written on it in permanent marker. You can get easily removable stickers or string tags at any variety or office supply store.
But definitely group by category. The Christmas collectors will love you.
True that. I helped my mother with her garage sale many years ago. She was moving back to Alaska from Oregon, so everything had to go. She started putting out opened dry food items and the like (half bags of flour, etc), and I thought she was nuts. People bought it. One guy came by looking for shoes and bought all of my fathers used shoes. He only wanted the left shoe: he’d fallen off a cliff and really messed up his left foot. As a result, he needed a larger shoe for that foot than for his right, so it was pointless and expensive for him to buy new shoes.
Thanks for the good ideas. I just walked around the neighborhood and left notes on the doors trying to encourage someone else to have a sale on the same day. I think that would really boost traffic.
I am all about doing things to encourage more sales, like “$2 each, or 3 for $5.” I know that kind of marketing gets me every time. 