Household Has-Beens : From Bicycles to Lampshades to Books, Unwanted Items Find New Owners Via the Garage Sale
Comedian Phyllis Diller used to cruise garage sales searching for treasures among trash.
“I bought eight guitars at a St. Louis garage sale once,” she says. “At that same sale, I bought a blond wig and I used that as my fright wig in all my shows. Boy, it’s ugly.”
Diller and people like her support nation’s driveway economy, in which millions of dollars change hands every season.
Garage, tag, rummage and yard sales--call them what you want--are put on by people who want to unload the unwanted.
Take a look at the classified section of this newspaper. Chances are you’ll find a separate listing just for garage sales. Thursday is a big day for newspaper ads since the sales frequently run Friday through Sunday.
There’s a whole lot of retailing going on.
Just ask Chris Stevenson, the Huntington Beach author of “Garage Sale Mania: How to Hold a Profitable Garage, Yard or Tag Sale.”
“There is so much money in this just for a weekend,” he said. “It’s a multimillion-dollar business.”
Getting an accurate fix on garage-sale revenue is impossible.
In Michigan, for example, the state Treasury and Commerce Department doesn’t track money changing hands at the sales. All those dusty bicycles, flower vases and sets of three matching glasses aren’t subject to state sales tax because they’re used items and not sold in a licensed business.
To help get an idea of how much money passes through these private flea markets, look at Livonia, a bedroom community of about 105,000 people west of Detroit.
Last year, Livonia issued 2,792 garage-sale permits at a buck apiece. Forgetting that some sales escaped the permit process, that works out to .03 garage sales per person, per year.
Now for the money. The fuzz factor gets kind of heavy here but Stevenson says a typical garage sale nets about $100.
That means that garage sales shoppers in Michigan fork over about $28 million a year for other people’s junk. That’s slightly more than the annual budget for the entire state park system.
Take that nationwide, and the driveway economy adds up to about $720 million annually.
Where there’s money, there’s a whole lot of advice on how to deal with it, including some from Diller.
Her videotape, “How to Have a Moneymaking Garage Sale,” is now being distributed.
“I realized that people were not being efficient,” she said. “They’re good for the environment because you don’t throw it away or bury it.”
Some tips from her video:
* Check with your insurance company.
* Plan on 1/10th of the original price for clothes and 1/5th for working appliances.
* For security, never publish a phone number in advertisements.
The latest edition of “Books in Print” lists four titles beginning with the words “Garage Sale,” including Stevenson’s.
Stevenson says weapons are hot sellers. “We bought some rifles for $39.95 and revarnished the stocks and blued the barrels and sold them for $69.95,” he says.
Tools and tool chests, exercise equipment and clothing also do well. Stevenson says mattresses and box springs are losers, as are jigsaw puzzles, which often are incomplete.
Inventory arrangement can help at the cash box. Sometimes it’s beneficial to arrange male- and female-oriented items on separate tables with gender-neutral items such as luggage in between.
Stevenson also has some strategies for people who are serious about becoming garage sale barons like him. Stevenson’s brother-in-law got him hooked on other people’s castoffs.
“We learned how to run around and buy out other garage sales in a ‘bid-out,’ ” he says. “We would take the total inventory of a sale for a set price. Usually we would do this early in the morning.
“If they refused us, we would hit them early in the afternoon and see if they would take our price, usually lower than in the morning.”
The deals usually were accepted.
Garage-sale prowlers usually fit into one of four general categories.
* The Idly Curious: Fair-weather shoppers, usually traveling in couples, who fork over a dime here or a quarter there. Big spenders they’re not.
* The Jokesters: The next time you get a gag gift at a birthday party or a family get-together, it probably was picked up at a garage sale by one of these characters. Some considerable money, maybe $5 or so, can be involved in a transaction.
* The True Bargain-Hunters: These are a seller’s dream. Frequently these are people with REAL money, looking for bicycles or big-ticket baby stuff such as cribs, swings or high chairs. Sometimes they’re hunting for true moneymakers such as washing machines and dryers.
* The Hard-Core Garage Sale Prowler: The bane of all hosts. These solo shoppers come armed with large bags for little stuff. They’ll quibble over a nickel on a 15-cent onetime family heirloom, unconcerned or oblivious that they’re asking for a 33% discount.
Making money despite deep discounts may be the second-most important factor in evaluating the success of a garage sale.
“It’s not the money,” one garage sale host says. “It’s the cubic yards removed.”
“Garage Sale Mania: How to Hold a Profitable Garage, Yard or Tag Sale” is published by Betterway Publishing, P.O. Box 219; Crozet, Va., 22932.
