The Biennial Garage Sale

The Biennial Stonebrook Village Garage sale took place.  It must have been the phases of the moon, but it seemed like every other neighborhood along Rochester Road had their garage sales yesterday, too.  Opinions were mixed as to whether or not this was a good or a bad thing.  Did the preponderance of such sales increase traffic, and, hence, sales, or did the preponderance of such sales mean that everyone spent all their money before they got to our neighborhood?  I'll leave that one to the boys in Market Research to sort out.

Loyal Readers may recall me writing on this topic two years ago after our first Garage Sale (http://www.grandstander.blogspot.com/2011/06/neighborhood-garage-sale.html), and many of the things mentioned then held true once again yesterday - the things we thought would sell didn't, the things we didn't think would sell (an old harmonica, e.g.) did, and the glimpse of human nature you get as people try to get you to come down from two dollars to one dollar on some piece-of-crap widget that you are trying to unload ("it's two lousy dollars, you jerk!").  Anyway, we did manage to get rid of a lot of "stuff", which was the main point of the exercise, and we cleared fifty-eight bucks in the process, so what the hell?

I will close with one anecdote from the day.  One of our big ticket items that I was sure would sell was a TV stand.  It was a pretty nice one, was only two years old, and cost us around a hundred and thirty bucks when we originally bought it. We had it marked at $25, and were hoping we'd get twenty for it.  Turns out, no one was in the market for it.  In the last hour of the sale, we were at the "make us an offer" point.  Some guy comes up with his wife, checks out the stand and asks what do I want for it.  I say "we were asking $25".  He says "how about $5?".  I say "How about $10?"  And at this point, our neighbor says from her driveway "you don't even have to put it together".  The jackwagon then says "Five."  And, as much as I wanted to get rid of the TV stand, I say "No".  Something inside of me just would not let me give in to this tightwad.

I won't print here what I REALLY wanted to say to this cheapskate.

So, if any  of you readers out there need a TV stand, get in touch with me.  It's back down in our lower level.  Just don't offer me five bucks for it!