Yard Sales 101 - Part 2!

Yard Sales 101 by Tania Angelo and Nancy Carroll

(Part 2 of a 4 part series)

It's time for part 2 of our yard sale etiquette series! If you missed the first post, you can see it here: http://thevintagedresser.blogspot.com/2009/05/its-yard-sale-season.html.

Today we are talking about planning and pricing... what?! you say... you're actually supposed to price everything?!

Planning. Plan your sale layout with customers in mind. Prepare your staging area, have your yard sale where people can see it. We don’t like going inside a house unless it is an Estate sale, then we are expecting that it will be indoors. We also don’t want to walk two city blocks to your backyard only to find a tiny pile of junk that should have gone in the garbage can (see part 1)! Having your sale in an easy to see spot is best and you’ll lure people in who are just passing by too!

If you want to get rid of stuff, put it up on a table so we don’t have to bend over boxes full of stuff. Or at least take it out of the boxes and spread it out so it can be seen. And wipe it off for Heaven’s sake, no one likes looking through filthy, dusty junk! Clean junk… well now, that’s another story!

Pricing. Decide in advance what you want for things! Price things carefully… or at least… PUT A PRICE ON IT! If we have to ask the price of every single thing that we might be interested in, we probably won’t bother.

Don’t try to haggle with us on everything we ask about (for more on haggling see http://thevintagedresser.blogspot.com/2009/05/new-one-for-me.html). If we are interested we’ll ask if you will take less for it & then we can haggle. Or we’ll just pay the price you are asking. This is the most irritating scenario that we encounter on almost EVERY SINGLE garage sale outing:

Me: “Excuse me, how much do you want for this?”
You: “oh gee… hmmm… I don’t know… how about… well… what about… hmmm…$10.00?”
Me: “Ok, thank you” putting item back down on the table thinking $10 bucks, Judas Priest, these people are crazy!
You: watching me put the item down, “How about $8.00”?
Me: trying to be polite, “No thank you”.
You: “$5.00”?
Me: wishing you would leave me the hell alone now I just shake my head.
You: “well what would you give me for it”?
Me: wanting to say, “NOTHING NOW”, because you’ve irritated the holy crap out of me! “.25 cents”… see? Now you’re insulted!

And it goes on from there until we finally leave without buying anything. This is a yard sale after all; there isn’t much that should be $10.00 unless it’s a piece of furniture or something like that. If it’s worth that much to you put it on eBay or sell it on Craig's List!