Garage Sale Survival Guide - Part 2

Posted by Nostalgiaholic | on July 28, 2008

Part Two of the Nostalgiaholic Garage Sale Survival Guide - The art of grabbing and haggling the best junk and ignoring price tags. A loving look at all that nostalgic swag.

Click here for Part 1 of the Survival Guide

The Swag

Whoever said “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” must have frequented a garage sale or two.

Yard sales are a lot of things, they are a communal social event, they are museums of forgotten (and in most cases, pointless) gadgetry, and they are the last great bastion of the ancient barter system. Above all other things though, yard sales are possibly the ONLY opportunity for you to find and purchase some very unique and nostalgic items.

Yard Sale pic

Look at all that beautiful junk! On tables, in boxes, a buck a piece, three for a ‘dollah, chipped, faded, used, brand-new, it’s all here!!!

Clothing - If you ever wanted to know what your neighbors wore a decade ago, their yard sales will shine a light upon some dark periods in fashion. Checked vests, old sweat pants, lumberjack shirts and whole outfits from the 70s and 80s are still haunting closets these days, and yard sales are their moment in the sun before they are trashed. You can score clothing at a yard sale for a fraction of the cost they’re asking at Value Village. Great for less-than-picky friends and relatives.

Toys - Don’t be fooled by the re-productions of classic toys and action figures lining the shelves of Toy’s-R-Us these days, if you want original GIJoes, He-Men, Skip-Its, Baseball cards, Thundercats, Hot Wheels, Video Games and all the rest… you gotta hit those shoeboxes hard. Just remember; When at a yard sale, do as the Scroungers do…

Survival Tip #4 - Scrounge

Scroungers have developed a compulsive need to rummage through boxes of vintage toys and booklets of trading cards looking for the last piece to their never-ending collections. Follow their rodent-like example and get in there !!! move stuff around, get under the tables, pull stacks out of the book bins to find out what is beneath. Trust me, you never know when the dusty bottom of a shoebox will yield up a nostalgic treasure.

Pile ‘o toys

Children’s Stuff - During the formative period of a child’s life, they have growth spurts, mobility phases, and the attention span of goldfishes. As such, parents tend to discard an alarming amount of clothes, toys, and strollers within a very short period of their child’s life. All this baby swag ends up on the tables for other parents to use and abuse for a brief time with their children. Ah, the circle of life.

Vinyl

Vinyl - Unless you live in a major city with access to smoke-filled bomb-shelter-sized record shops, yard sales are probably the only way your going to get your hands on good vinyl. I’m not talking the scads of Zamfir or Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass LPs that populate consignment stores, gimme The Stooges, Moby Grape, or maybe a rare MC5 disc. Check out this rare Bob Dylan demo I found at a yard sale down the street.

Antiques - The Holy grail for the professional yard saler is to find some tarnished tea set or faded watercolour painting, pay a buck for it, and find out it’s actually worth thousands.

Appliances and Furnature - Is your electric hair curling iron not er, curling enough? Try one from three decades ago ! Is your easy chair not easy enough ? Slip into a Laz-E-Boy so broken-in that you’d believe it was owned by elephants. Tape decks, egg-shaped record players, mod lights and those bizarre 60s chairs shaped like hands can sometimes be spied on local lawns. If you absolutely HAVE to buy this stuff at a yard sale, be prepared for missing parts, and don’t be surprised if your brand new hand vacuum just plain doesn’t work. Spooning For You pic

The Weird Stuff - As you stroll past the tables piled with all the aforementioned junk, something strange and wonderful will inevitably catch your eye. Nine times out of ten, these unique artifacts don’t really fall into any other category of sale, they just make you think “WTF?”. Weird as they are, you have to possess them, even if you don’t understand why… believe me, I know. There is a porcelain teaspoon holder shaped like a squirrel in my kitchen that reads “Spooning For You In Virginia City“. It is the most hideous thing you, I or anyone have ever seen, but for some reason Crystal needed to own it.

Survival Tip # 5 - Channel Your Inner Pack-Mule

Once you’ve spotted an item or two that you’re interested in, for goodness sake PICK IT UP !!! The law of the jungle is: If something is on the tables, it’s fair game, so grab as much as you can and keep it in your hands until you reach the cashbox. This may sound paranoid, but I’ve seen lots of stuff punked right out from under people just because they hesitated for too long.

Okay, you’ve got an armful of junk, and that ten bucks is burning a hole in your back pocket. It’s time to face the music, so you’d better know how to dance.

The Haggle

Some people go to yard sales and simply grab an item that interests them, pay the owner whatever the little price sticker tell ‘em to pay, and then they leave. This system is efficient, but not thrifty, and completely avoids the fundamental yard sale experience… Haggling.

In just about every other culture on the planet, haggling is the established norm for all major purchases. In Markets, street vendors, and even privately owned stores around the world, little old ladies argue with sellers about the proper price markup of everything you can imagine. Grandma wants that rug, or chibatta bread for the lowest price she can get, and the vendor wants to make as much profit as he/she can… The battle of wills commences. Garage sales are no different, do you really want to pay two dollars for a CB Radio from the 60s that may or may not work ? No way !!!

Survival Tip #6 - The Sticker Lies

Like some obscure Sun Tzu quote, you must prepare your mind for the coming haggle by first fixing a price in your mind that you will pay for an item, and then fight to attain nothing less. The sticker price is a reflection of the seller’s “best case scenario”, one that will slide into “Whatever I can get for it” as the morning burns into afternoon.

Start off with “I’ll give you…” as opposed to the more natural “How much for…?” and the battle will begin. If you’ve nabbed an armful of items, the seller might settle on a price for the whole lot together instead of individually. This will work in your favour, and again, is more likely to happen later in the morning.

With a couple of dirty tricks up your sleeve, you’ll have a better chance of landing your target sale price. Small-talking up the seller, or sharing merchandise-related stories creates familiarity and might entice a bit of sympathy. Pointing out chips, dents, scratches or any other imperfections in the merchandise could go either way; the seller lowers the price out of shame, or declines to sell when insulted. A good poker face doesn’t hurt your chances either, of course it’s no substitution for a well laid plan… and you have a well laid plan don’t you ? Remember when you left your wallet in the car ? Here’s why;

Survival Tip #7 - Forget Your Wallet Pt. 2

This trick has always worked for me, no lie. The seller just won’t budge on his/her price, it’s a little above what you want to pay, and you can sense the deal closing with or without you… Don’t panic! Simply put your items down, fish around in your back pocket, pull out your crumpled ten dollars in front of the seller and frown your most believable frown. “All I got is ten” is the line, how convincingly you sell it will determine how your precious trash/treasures get sold to you. The seller doesn’t know you’ve got Fort Knox in the car, in most cases he/she will feel the tension of a potentially lost sale and settle for some money over no money.

One “Make or Break” technique that I caution against is scouting your purchases, then leaving the merchandise till the very end of the sale and returning just before everything goes back inside the garage. The theory is if the items aren’t gone, they’ll be practically free… but I find that nine times outta ten, they are just gone.

Tiki Thing Remember to keep your ideal price in mind during the haggle, and try not to let the deal go sour. The haggle isn’t an argument, it’s a light-hearted game of strategy and chance. Sometimes you’ll make your goal, and sometimes your price hits a little higher on the board. It’s all part of the hunt, and one of the reasons you got up so freakin early this morning!

“Look at all the sexy swag you scored! Is that an Omni-Bot ? Toni will freak !!! And my buddy Jess will dig this Tiki thing from the 70s, hes been dying to build a Tiki-Bar. How ’bout the Etch-a-Sketch ? I haven’t seen one in years!“

The trudge back to your car is the a little surreal after the first couple sales. You feel a little giddy with adrenaline from haggling, and sunstroke is only ten minutes away. As you pass the lines of cars parked along the curb, you nod to your fellow hunters with a shared ironic smile that says, “Geez, did I really just pay ten bucks for someone else’s old junk ?”

Yes… yes you did.

Pack all your booty into the trunk and speed to one last junk swap, or bloated with success, you return to your lair and put on a proper pot of coffee. It is only 11:00am after all. Check the newspaper again before you start your day (they might advertise NEXT week’s sales), and for godness sake’s relax! It’s Sunday! Your day off! Flip the news back on and maybe start on a little brunch. Sunday afternoons are wonderful things.

Happy hunting, and much love.

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