Last year one of the kids in the neighborhood had his new $500 bike stolen when he and a buddy stopped to look at some stuff at a weekend garage sale…or so he thought.
On Monday a kid showed up at school with the neat bike his Dad had picked up for him at a garage sale for only $75. Yup, it was the same bike- the a-hole running the sale sold it!
A couple weekends ago we had an SCA event at a local school. We had about 50 guys getting into armor, preparing to spend the entire day running around smacking each other with sticks. I looked across the street and saw some people setting up for a garage sale. I nudged a friend of mine, pointed across the street, and yelled, “What’s in YOUR garage sale?”
Nobody got it.
We bought a dresser once from our neighbors and I found, tucked behind one of the drawers, a Victoria’s Secret Bra. I figured it was Tammy’s, and suggested to my wife we should take it back to her. She pointed out that it might not be Tammy’s, and that would be a very bad idea.
** rostfrei**, unfortunately your experiences sound pretty standard. Shocking isn’t it?
The only thing I can add is that with ours it’s the crap that goes first. They’ll snap up any tacky stuff but leave the Williamsburg reproductions and the like.
I have had one positive experience to share though. I was getting rid of some old things, one of which was an antique shaving bowl with a lip notched out that you’d place against your throat while using the straight razor. Part of that lip had broken off and been glued back on but the fix had been poorly done, hence my decision to sell it for about $8.00 or so. Fortunately, a kind older guy in the know quitely informed me the bowl was worth about $600.00 undamaged and almost certainly more that the $8.00 I was asking.
Heh, it’s displayed proudly in the library now.
Only if they’re looking at it by the light of their life-sized manger-with-Santa panorama.
I’m sorry you missed the big sale, Mockingbird. It was the event of the year in the neighborhood.
Very true. We didn’t have any Williamsburg reproductions, but remember the flatware my mom had for sale (which I remind you we had for sale at $20.00 and eventually sold on eBay for $245.00)? It sat on the shelf for two days – even at half-price, but one of the first things to sell was a hideous wall plaque by Home Interiors that I had marked at $1.00 with every expectation that I’d end up coming down on the price. Steeply! A gold-colored plastic depiction of the Last Supper – mind-bogglingly ugly. The lady paid me her dollar happily and was thrilled to have the horrible thing! I’m glad I’ll never be going to her house!
About three garage sales, no thefts, a couple of earlies (probably dealers).
Definitely best to have at least 2 people selling; if combined garage sale have prices marked and both know how much the other is willing to come down; drat I had another principle but it’s fallen into a crack somewhere. Also get a good look at what they are selling beforehand, I sold a porcelain bowl without its lid.
Odd story: These young guys came be in a pricy car, enjoying life, and wanted to buy a fishing pole, and said they were too poor to pay the $5.00 or whatever the price was. I laughed, said, “Sorry, poor people aren’t allowed to buy fishing poles”. He came back a while later and paid the tagged price.
Other story: a “friend” tried to hand me some library books to sell in my sale! and emitted vibes ‘picked on and put out’ when I said no thanks. No I don’t sell stolen goods for people (not that I said that, I just kept saying “No thanks, these are library books” till he sulked himself off.)
Rich people are rich because they are tight with their cash.
I have only run one sale (I decided to move from CA back to NE on a Thursday, had the garage sale on Saturday, and was gone on Monday). No advertising. A couple people showed up with vans and pickups within 20 minutes, and pretty much bought out the entire sale in half of an hour. I am sure that they took the goods right to the flea market and resold them for profit.
God bless America… where cheap bastards can make 15-25% off of my crap. I wish I would have thought about selling MY soiled underwear…
I forgot to add what happened at the end of my yard sale.
I was contemplating packing up the unsold stuff and hauling it to my local thrift store, when some strange people showed up. It was a station wagon load of three men and two women. I swear, these people looked like a cross between the Beverly Hillbillies and those poor souls from the movie Deliverance. They ended up buying almost ALL of what I had left.
I was glad they bought up most of the stuff, but I was afraid one of them was going to make a comment about how pretty my mouth was. :o
In all fairness, he may have gotten them at a yardsale himself. I’ve gotten quite a few of them myself when I buy a box of books. I’ve always assumed that they were discards of some kind.
They will be suitably stamped “Discard” or something of that nature is this is/were the case.
[Simpsons]
I didn’t get rich by writing a bunch of checks!
[/Simpsons]
Fortunately, I’ve never had the pleasure of hosting a yard sale. From the sounds of this thread, that may be a life experience I will do my best to avoid.
Because we both have parents that absolutely cannot part with anything, they give it to us. (My SIL doesn’t get these offers, which is irksome.) but after years of receiving weathered and worn garden gnomes, a variety of other cheesy garden ornaments, outdoor garden tools that didn’t work, furniture that was from their poor married days and had no taste back then, etc
we were just getting stuffed into our house with the basements of two parental units houses.
For years my husband could not part with this stuff because, essentially, it was a gift from his parents and he didn’t want to hurt their feelings. With my mom’s stuff, it just went to goodwill when I could drop it off.
Y’know, the weed wacker that never worked, no matter how much time or money put into it. (coulda bought a new one for the same price.)
The push mowers, note plural, that had their own set of mechanical co-dependency problems that were never solved.
The $800 when new snow thrower that my MIL, a strapping german woman who could be a middle back for the Lions, could not start after the 4th yr or so, we got. And could never start ourselves.
All the old xmas decorations from our parents pasts, the remnants of Xmas’ gone by dating back to the fifties ( for me) and the 70’s (my husband.) Tinsel so thin and sparse it looked afflicted…can’t throw it out…give it to Shirley and Mr. Ujest.
The bag of aforementioned garden gnomes that were so weathered, that I guess I was suppose to repaint them and then set them free again into the wilds. Tragically, after a year in that bag, one well placed hip check onto that shelf done with malice and forethought sent those surly looking fellows to their death.
We decided, especially with my inlaws, that we are the Goodwill to them. When they give it to us, what that really means is, " Please, throw this out for us*"
And so we do.
Every bit of it…
Has ended up on the curb.
I know we could make money on it, but I feel more guilty about taking peoples money for that crap than the joy I get knowing that it is clogging up someone else’s garage.
*And they are going on vacation in two weeks with my SIL and they have asked us to put their dog to sleep. (He’s 12 or 13 now and just not there anymore.) All I can tell you is that I am not putting that dog down.
I wish I new a taxidermist, I’d have Miles stuffed 
Back before Mr Wolf and I married, we went down to visit his family for a weekend - they were having a garage sale, so we helped out a bit.
The odd story was that I had no idea how much they wanted to come down on anything, and I was mostly a monitor anyway. Any attempts to hand me cash or haggle got the buyer pointed to whoever was closest.
Including the one gentleman who showed up in a truck, looked at me, poked around the sale (still looking at me), poked around some more (still looking at me), and finally picked up five votive Hallowe’en candle holders. Priced at about ten cents each.
He tried to offer me three dollars for them.
I just blinked at him (kinda stupidly), and waved him on to Mr Wolf’s sister. He looked at me with what I swear was disappointment, offered Kris three dollars. She told him they were only ten cents. He insisted on three dollars.
So she took it.
He left, waving bye to me (and just me, no one else).
It was a rather creepy experience, and I asked Kris if inflation had to do with what he paid.
…is this an urban legend? I mean, I’ve been to a lot of yard sales…and 99% of the stuff for sale is junk! Even in wealthy neighborhoods…most of the stuff looks like it had been dropped from a truck, and run over a few times! What really amazes me…somebody trying to sell chipped plates, cracked glasses, etc…who would buy such dreck?
So, has anybody ACTUALLY bought something at a yard sale that turned out to be a valuable antique?
Not a yard sale, but a flea market, which is close enough…I bought an entire set of McCoy brown drip dishes plus serving pieces that someone had dragged out of their dead grandmother’s attic and sold the entire box of stuff to me for $3.00.
Here’s a link to an Ebay auction for the divided bowl that was included with the set I bought, currently going for $7.99. I figure that if you sold all of the pieces individually, I’d get a few hundred dollars for it.
So, yes. Sometimes people really don’t know what they have.
I’ve gotten quite a few great items this way. Nothing worth millions, but some very nice stuff.
For example, I picked up a tray at one yard sale, because my mom had mentioned she needed a TV tray. It was hideously ugly, covered with a green-flowered wallpaper. “Oh well,” I thought. “It doesn’t matter how ugly it is. It’ll do the job.”
When I got it home, I decided to peel off the wallpaper, just to see what it looked like beneath. I was amazed. It turned out to be an antique beer tray with a beautiful picture. Through a search on the 'Net, I determined it was worth about $100.
I’ve gotten vaulable books, bottles, a vase, and a few other odds and ends. Nothing earth-shattering, but worth far, far more than what I paid for them. Since I work in a museum, I’ve developed an “eye” for what’s valuable.
My grandmother has been even luckier than I. She bought a table at a yardsale for two dollars one time. Now that I work in a museum, I recognize that it’s extremely valuable . . . enough so that it should probably have a seperate insurance policy. (Granny doesn’t see it that way. It may be worth more to other people, but to her, it’s just a two-dollar table that she uses to hold her mail.)
It’s hit and miss. A lot of people are getting into “Antiques Roadshow”, so they know what they have. However, find one of those people who just doesn’t care about all of that “old junk” and you’ve hit pay-dirt.
I’ve found that wealthier neighborhoods are a waste of time in this regard. Most of my finds have come from rural yard-sales in which the people do have a lot of junk, but one or two of the items are sometimes very special.
As an occasional seller at the local Flea Market/Swap Meet, I truly dread the first hour or so. No matter how well I think I’ve prepared, the onslaught of the early shoppers always overwhelms me! My own tactic for dealing with people who really try to low-ball me on stuff is to RAISE the price.
My friend and I have a theory that 90% of the junk sold at these places just circulates around from seller to seller…
There was this story that, according to Snopes, is actually true.
http://www.snopes.com/luck/declare.htm
I remember seeing the commercial based on it. You could see a lot of people all checking not the picture, but trying to peer between it and the frame.
I’ve never found anything amazingly dear at a yard sale, but I’ve often resold things at a markup of about $10 or so on eBay. I rescued some things from my sister’s yard sale, when she was going to clean out the basement in the house she lives in (which used to be my grandmother’s), and sold a garbage can with Hanna Barbera characters on it for $65. I don’t think that’s too shabby a deal.
My grandparents, before they retired, spent 40+ years in the antique business. They had a shop when my mom and aunts were kids, but after they were all out of the house, my grandparents traveled around the country doing antique shows. You’d be amazed at the proportion of their merchandise that came from yard sales, estate sales, and flea markets.
After a while, they build up a good word-of-mouth reputation, so that any time someone in their area was selling the family home and moving south or into a condo or nursing home, my grandparents would get a call first. (It got to be really funny as my grandparents worked well into their 70s; my grandfather would mention that he was “going out to have tea with one of his little old ladies,” usually someone just a few years older than him who was clearing out her attic.) I’m sure he gave them more than they would get from most garage or estate sales, but left himself room to mark stuff up. He always had an amazing mental filing cabinet for the dealers at his next show, or regular custotmers, who might be interested in a particular item.
Right now he’s been through cancer and brain surgery, and he’s pretty frail, but he can still tell you in great detail about the beautiful Tiffany lamp he sold to Sotheby’s in 1962.