My mom and I had a garage sale last weekend.
It’s sort of like childbirth. Every time I do one of these, I promise myself I’ll never do it again. But time passes and I forget the pain and then I do it again.
After the last one, I kept an ongoing pile of stuff in my garage to give to charity. Well, this year, the pile got really big and I had some pretty nice stuff, like a gas barbeque pit, that made me think that a garage sale was a good idea again. I had forgotten the pain. Oh, silly me.
I told my mom I was thinking about having a garage sale and she said, “So am I!” So, we decided to combine all our great stuff and do it together. She lives two hours away from me. You’d think that red flags and sirens would go off in my brain, but, no, I told her that sounded great.
She hauled a truckful of her stuff here. Then her neighbor, Susie, decided to join us, and she has the “perfect” garage sale driveway, so then we hauled it all back. My stuff took two trips. Multiply the miles and gas it took, and you can see I was already going backwards in the making money department. Include the hours I wasn’t working, and well, you get the idea.
It was to begin at 8:00 a.m. and by 6:30 there were people knocking on Susie’s door. She’s not as mean as me, and let them all in. Minutes later, she was calling us in a panic, begging us to come quickly. I was still bleary-eyed, in my robe and fuzzy slippers. I was beginning to remember more reasons why I said I was never having another garage sale.
We thought we had some great stuff and really great prices. But no matter what price we asked, it was never good enough for the garage sale crowd.
There was a $200 exercycle that we had priced $10. A man came up and said, “What will you take for the exercycle? There are some things wrong with it.”
I wanted to say, “NO DUH?! Why do you think it’s in a garage sale marked $10, fella?!” Didn’t he realize what a bargain it was? What was he expecting us to say? “Oh, we’ve marked it $10, but that’s not really what we meant”?
But then the reality sets in that (a) we really never want to see the exercycle again and (b) we’ll be giving it to the Salvation Army if it doesn’t sell.
My mom said, “How ‘bout $9.00?”
“Eight,” he said.
Sold. Don’t have to trip over that thing anymore.
The barbeque pit went for $25. The Polo shirts went for 50 cents. The leather purse was stolen. By the end of the second day, the artificial Christmas tree still had not sold, even though the price had been marked down to $5.00. When a woman bought an angel Christmas tree topper, we told her the tree went with it.
By the end, I was so completely exhausted I could barely get out of the antique chair that was one of the few things that had not been sold. Susie wouldn’t come down on the price. People won’t buy stuff at garage sales if they haven’t gotten a bargain on a bargain.
I had been bargained to death. I’m never gonna do this again. Really. No, REALLY.
