When was your last garage sale? October 2022
We had a garage sale recently and it went pretty well. My father-in-law recently inherited his childhood home which came with a lot of interesting items. He worked for the Army and lived overseas a lot, this led to several items being collected from various places. The bulk of the items came from his time in Peru including some large tapestries, a few really cool wooden reclining chairs and way more crystal glasses than anyone would ever need. There were also some old maps that were interesting to look at. I have a feeling some of these items would have been worth quite a bit online but with the sheer amount of the items it just seemed easier to have a 2 day garage sale and let someone else handle that portion should they decide to try and flip anything for a profit.
To me it seemed like there were 3 main types of shoppers, those that were dealers and planned on only buying items that they knew they could resell for a profit. These always surprised me when they would get upset when we wouldn’t give them a deep discount for something just because they wanted to resale it later for a profit. I get that reciprocating saw is going to be more expensive to ship than the silverware but I'm not going to give it to you for $5 to guarantee you will make a $20 profit when it sells.
The 2nd type we saw a lot of and those were the bargain impulse shoppers. In a way I am proud of them, the fact that they feel the need to buy something but go to garage sales to do so they don’t overspend on something they don’t need is great. We had some old mcdonalds toys for sale at 10 cents each and they seemed to always want those. Some would buy a shirt for some event or party that's coming up. The shirt they had on already looked like it would have worked to me but I'm sure having something different was exciting. Or at the very least scratched the itch of wanting to get something new.
The 3rd type was the nosy neighbor, a lot of people walked their dogs or just went for walks in that area and they typically stopped by to see what was for sale or just to say high. We weren’t annoyed by it or anything, it was nice having someone to talk to instead of sitting in a lawn chair all day. To be honest i probably would have fallen under this category, if i’m out for a walk and see a sale going on i would probably stop in to check it out too. I never carry my wallet with me on walks but they dont that.
