Put On Your Haggling Hat
I come from a long line of thrifters. Junkin’, yard salin’, antiquin’ – it’s all in my blood. Growing up I was my grandmother’s shadow in her small town antique shop – pricing items, helping shoppers whether they liked it or not and even running the cash register. At ten years old I was a pro, so I thought.
Some nineteen years later, I am anything but a pro but still must admit that I love a good yard sale or thrift store. This weekend we returned to my entrepreneurial roots and put it all out on the curb – and even better we teamed up with friends to do it. Friends with lots of unwanted stuff, a great busy location and plenty of on street parking. Their Irish Setter Ginger attracted lots of business for us too. It was a win win location.
Here’s a picture taken at the start of the sale. Lot of stuff was already gone – those early birds kept me from taking photos for about half an hour.
Here is how we threw it all together in case you’re looking for some tips yourself. Best idea ever though – find someone to join forces with and double your inventory. It was awesome. Our super-organized friends Taylor and Jenny deserve all the credit, we were still pulling things out of closets last night.
We basically gathered all our junk around the dining room table last night and held a veto session. Either one of us could veto any item being sold and decide to keep it. Some of those staying on the island included golf clubs, an old school wooden checkers set, and a framed print from the Louisville Slugger Museum. We didn’t take any photos of the process, since lots of friends and family members are also blog readers we couldn’t remember who may have given us what and didn’t want to offend anyone who might have given us the santa claus night light three Christmases ago.
But anyways, back to the tips.
- Get organized. We planned a date about a month before in order to give ourselves plenty of time to really think about the things we could part with and what we wanted to sell our items for. In our case we also used two different colored pricing stickers – one for each family so we could easily divy up our profits at the end of the day. The extra time allowed us to research if we had anything really valuable or to decide if something could be better sold on Craigslist. Like Taylor’s Star Wars Pez Dispensers. Apparently they are worth a few bucks on Ebay - if Yoda’s eyes had been closed they’d be millionaires though… or maybe five hundredaires.
- Get the word out. Jenny posted an advertisement on Craiglist the Monday before our Saturday sale (doing so any further in advance could cause shoppers to lose track of what weekend your sale was held) and also made signs for her front lawn and nearby corners to attract the buyers. We purchased a $10 pack of premade garage sale signs but decided to return them and handmade our own. Didn’t want to cut into our profit margin – that’s 20 more of Chad and Taylor’s T-Shirts we’d have to sell. Oh, and in the Craigslist posting we named some of the bigger items that we had to offer but didn’t list prices.
- Be ready for early birds. The plan was to start at 8 a.m., everyone else in Durham’s plan was to start at 7:30 a.m. Guess who won.
- Size matters. You know how they say if you’re being attacked by a bear try to look big? Same goes for yard sales. Spread your stuff out so that it looks like you have a lot of items and so that people can actually see what they’re shopping for. We had two rugs for sale, so we rolled them right out on the lawn. We also categorized our items into sections like electronics, kitchen items, clothing, books, etc. If you have extra tables around use them to display items at varying levels, some on the ground, others higher up.
- Put on your haggling hat. Chad is the best at this and I’m trying to learn. Just decide what’s more important. The money or getting the stuff out of the house. We decided it was more important to get the junk out. So we priced our stuff to sell and met most hagglers in the middle. For example these bottles were pretty cool. Jenny dug them up out of their back yard years ago but wanted them out. 25 cents each. Too bad they didn’t sell. To be completely honest – we didn’t haggle too much with the early birds. If they were first in the door, we were confident the good stuff would go for our asking price later and told them so. We won most of the arguements. Also, if the sale’s dragging on or slows down don’t be afraid to put a “1/2 price” sign on the curb to attract even more passers by.
- Don’t just take it all back home. You wanted to get rid of the junk right? So take it straight to a charity to donate – in our case we’ll be using the leftover items to meet my Junior League Bargain Sale quota this year. Score and score.
Here’s the carnage left after our slew of shoppers.
Any other families out their gathering it up and getting it out? Most of our junk was crammed into closets so their isn’t a real visible change around the casa, but we just feel lighter. Except of course for this big wad of cash in our pocket.
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