Garage Sale!

WAYNE’S WORDS
Volume 1 Number 8
Garage Sale

Women can get you to do just about anything.

So I did it again. I had a garage sale.

8 years ago I vowed to myself to never have another one! I must say, however, that this weekend’s sale was a lot more profitable and a lot more fun than the one in 1999. I don’t know why it was more profitable. My crap wasn’t any better this time than my 1999 crap and the customers were sure NOT willing to pay more than they were back then. I do know it was more fun because of my partner in crime.

The need to get rid of some crap came up because I asked my girlfriend to move in with me and for some reason she actually said yes. She is a fool. So, anyway we had doubles of a lot of crap and a lot of crap for which we didn’t have room. The garage sale came up because my girlfriend said we should have one and for some reason I said yes. I am a fool.

Have you ever prepared for one of these things? We spent all week getting ready. We gathered crap, sorted crap and stored crap. We were constantly singing the Clash’s Should I Stay or Should I Go in our heads about some of the crap we weren’t sure about. We argued a tiny bit about crap. It was kind of a crappy week. Ha, ha.

I even went to the trouble of going to get hangers from the dry cleaners (Thanks Comet!) to hang all of the clothing up so people could go through it easier. I borrowed a round retail clothing rack from a friend (Thanks to The Gen) so I wouldn’t have to hang all the clothes across my garage door opening on a rope.

We decided the night before the sale to price the furniture and small crap on the table (candlesticks, walkmans, etc.) and we made a large poster sized price list for the clothing on the rack. We also spent Friday evening (prior to the big day) rearranging the garage itself so that we could pull the stuff into the driveway in order so it would be arranged all nice and neat. We are fools.

We might as well have thrown all the crap into the driveway at 7am and let the people dig through the pile until they found something they liked and told them to tell us how much they wanted to pay for it. They didn’t care about prices. They didn’t care about how neatly it was displayed. They only cared about the fact that they wanted it and only wanted to pay a quarter for it.

Many people have told me that the haggling is the best part of the garage sale experience. Those people are fools. I can kind of understand not wanting to pay a whole fifty dollars for a sofa (what were we thinking), but the clothing buyers were the folks that really irked me!

We had my girlfriend’s Tommy Hilfiger, barely worn jeans marked at a buck or two. These jeans cost anywhere from 60 to 100 bucks a pair. “Pagaré cincuenta centavos para este!” I don’t think I understand garage sale-ese so I said ok and the lady gave me 50 cents! What the hell? It was not an isolated incident either; it kept happening over and over. Finally I gave up and made a sign that I stuck to the rack that read “All clothes on rack 50 cents each.” It was quite funny how everyone who moments before could not – (say it like Chris Tucker with me) “unnerstand the words that were comin’ out of my mouf” could suddenly read English! What quick studies they were.

Now that we have sold the extra couches and tables for next to nothing, my suits for 50 cents each, name brand purses for 25 cents (I don’t know if they were Coach but they were fancy) and a whole slew of our other belongings for nickels and dimes - I am just happy it’s over. I guess it wasn’t all bad; we did deal in volume so we made a few hundred dollars off of several thousand dollars worth of our crap. I guess that’s something.

We also got to work on a project together. That is really the cool part, the togetherness, the “us against them” feeling. Then after the whole thing was done, we decided on spending more time together and blew our profits on dinner. We are fools.

Until Next Time,
Wayne