Though I have lived on this earth for over a quarter of a century, somehow I have failed to amass many memories of attending yard sales. I do recall an instance in the late 1980’s when my father decided to sell of my collection of stuffed animals for 50 cents a piece without asking me beforehand, but really that’s less of a “yard sale memory” and more of a “why I’m currently in therapy memory”. Let’s move on, shall we? We shall.
Despite the fact that I had never joined their clan, I had always been aware of the existence of yard sale people: Crook eyes bargain hunters and bag ladies, hell bent on loading up their station wagons with affordably priced but entirely unusable garbage whenever they get the chance to do so. Oh yes, I’ve known their kind… but I’d always assumed that the yard sale person had become extinct within the past 7 or 8 years, when websites such as ebay and craigslist managed to streamline and digitize the art of finding antiquated crap at dirt cheap prices, so you can imagine how quickly and violently my eyes rolled when my parents informed me that they were going to host a yard sale to get rid of some of their excessive excess following their move into a smaller house. I tried to explain to them that yard sale people don’t exist anymore, that their sale would net them nothing more than $50 and an afternoon well wasted, but they wouldn’t listen. Undeterred, they pressed on with their precious yard sale idea.
Let the record show that, at least this once, they were right, and I was wrong. SO wrong.
I agreed to help them with their sale, which was scheduled to run from 10am until 4pm. I had planned to show up around 10:30am, as I figured the largest rush of people would come around the lunch hour, so you can imagine my surprise when I received a frantic phone call from my father at 9:45am telling me, quite frankly, that I needed to get over there “right now”. After hastily donning my most attractive t-shirt, sweat pants, and slippers combo, I high tailed it over to my parents’ old house, where I was absolutely astonished to find a line of 40 or so people impatiently waiting outside of our door. It was like our house had turned into Best Buy on the day after Thanksgiving, except instead of lining up to get great deals on cds, dvds, and A/V equipment, our customers were lining up to buy half empty bottles of vitamins, Easter decorations from the mid 1970’s, and a veritable gross of plastic forks. Go figure.
On the whole, my parents netted over a cool grand in crap sales (obviously, they had a few more desirable items than the ones I listed in the above paragraph), and they got rid of most of their garbage to boot. Personally, I don’t know whether to be impressed or disgusted, but I suppose those kind of insights aren’t often revealed to part timers in the field of yard sales.
Note to self: Never become more than a part timer in the field of yard sales.
