Wheel Of Robbery, Turn Turn Turn

Or, Garage Sales Are Awsome

So we had a garage sale this weekend.

MRS. C: You know this means we're officially homeowners, now.

ME: All those mortgage payments we've been making didn't count?

MRS. C: Nope!

I put this in just to show that I'm not the only one around here who likes to take a ride on the wackytown express.

Anyway, garage sales are awsome. I had no idea. And the best part? We now have enough space in the garage to park the car!

Along the way, I learned a bunch of interesting stuff.

Stuff I learned about garage sales
First, I learned that the thing about a garage sale? You're selling junk. Seriously. Junk. If it weren't junk, you'd be keeping it. Or you'd be selling it on Ebay for more than it's going to cost you to post the item, set up the auction, pack up the item, take it down to the shipping store, and send it off to the buyer.

If you're putting out on a tarp on your lawn in the hopes that some random passerby is going to throw a couple dollars at you, it's junk.

There are a couple implications that arise from this. One is, any price is a good price. If you mark it as "one dollar", and somebody waves it in your face and asks "fifty cents?", the correct answer is "sure!"

A couple months ago we drove past a garage sale, and I saw an Aeron chair. I sat in an Aeron chair once, back during the dot-com boom. But that's a different story. The point is, they are awsome. They are expensive, and they are worth it. So I made Mrs. C stop the car, and I looked at the chair. They had it marked "$120"--an incredibly good deal. But I got clever. I asked the guy, "how about $80 for the chair?" And he agreed without batting an eyelash. At the time I thought I was the King of All Hagglers. But now I know better. He already had all the Aeron chairs he needed. As far as he was concerned, that one was junk.

Right. So. You have all this junk. You want to get rid of it. People come by, offer to pay you money to take away your junk. This is awsome. You don't want to ruin it by trying to get your money's worth. You've already squeezed all the money's worth you can get from that thing. Anything you make now is pure profit.

So we got rid of a bunch of junk this way. A crappy entertainment center, that we'd inherited from the previous tenants at a rental several years ago, and had been carting around with us ever since. A hideous dining room table, that Mrs. C has always hated with the passion of a thousand suns.

Passionate suns.

I have a theory about how people buy stuff at a garage sale. I figure, when a person goes to a store, they already have something in mind. They go to that store to buy that thing, at the store's listed price. But when people go to a garage sale, there's no telling what they'll find. They don't really have anything in mind at all, that they want to buy. So if something catches their eye, they're only going to buy it if they like the price. If they don't like the price, so what? Two minutes ago, they had no intention of buying it anyway. So if your goal is to get rid of junk (and it is), it's really important to agree to whatever price they propose.

You have a truck with you, and you'll take this horrible entertainment center away right now? Great! And you'll give me fifty dollars, too? Even better!

More stuff I learned
Another thing I learned is that people will buy the craziest things at garage sales. Pulp Fiction. On VHS. Microsoft Office. For Windows 95. The Twilight novels. Seriously. A single ugly curtain panel from a set of six ugly curtain panels.

Mrs. C did some research online, "how to hold a garage sale", like that. We learned it's a good idea to put out a cooler full of cold beverages, and sell them for 50 cents each. That's a huge profit margin, and in the Southern California sun we made bank on Coke, Fresca, and bottled water.

Wheel of Robbery
Finally, I learned that people will steal stuff from garage sales. Hearken to my freakish tale of human nature!

So these two ladies are wandering through our junkocracy, accumulating a bunch of junk that I assume they're going to buy. One of these ladies has some horrible little tchotchke tucked up under her arm. Why anybody on earth would want to buy it, I don't know. I'm not even sure why we bought it. When Mrs. C added it to the sale, I was pleased. When I saw that this woman was going to pay me for it, I was ecstatic.

Anyway, after a little while, these two ladies come up to me. The one with the horrible tchotchke under her arm holds out a stack of old clothes she wants to buy. I guesstimate the number of items in the stack, make up some hilariously low price (I find simple math tiresome, so actually counting the items and adding up the prices in fifty-cent increments was sooo not going to happen). I gesture towards the tchotchke, and I'm about to ask if she wants to buy that, too, when her friend cuts me off.

Actually, her friend cuts right in front of her, grabs a digital alarm clock off the table next to me, and asks me how much it is. I'm a little surprised to see this alarm clock, since we'd recently replaced it on account of its snooze button being broken.

Here at Chez Container, an alarm clock without a snooze button is unacceptable.

So I'm a little taken aback. I'm not sure it's really ethical to put broken stuff up for sale. On the other hand, we do have a sign that says "all sales are final" (another thing Mrs. C learned from her research). And she is offering to pay me money to take away my junk. "It doesn't work very well," says Mrs. C, helpfully. And that cinches it. I name a price, the lady pays it, and the two of them walk off.

About a minute later, I remember the horrible tchotchke. That lady totally walked off without paying for it! And I'm pretty sure her friend played interference for her, distracting me when I was about to mention it.

For a brief instant, I was annoyed. I'd been ripped off! Crime! Thievery! Buncha savages in this town!

But then I realized something: I was relieved. It was junk, and it was gone. Of all the things you could possibly steal from me, something I should never have had in the first place, and was trying to get rid of anyway? Good riddance. You're doing me a favor, lady.

Plus, your friend just paid me good money for a broken alarm clock. The Wheel of Robbery? In your face.