Sometime before Christmas, Audra and I decided to have a garage sale. There were a few reasons. One, the pain from our move over a year and a half ago was still fresh in my mind. I can't tell you how many heavy boxes of crap I hauled thinking the whole time, "I haven't seen, let alone used, the twenty pounds of shit in this box in years." It was also the first time for me dealing with a combined household so I was forever accusing Audra of owning tons of worthless shit. Of course, I was at least as bad or worse. It's funny how a lack of personal attachment to something allows you to see the truth in full focus about how dumb it is to hold on to certain possessions. But c’mon, how can you part with a titty mug?
I resolved at that time that I wasn't going to move all of that useless stuff ever again. Plus, with Christmas coming and a wedding on the horizon that meant a bunch of gifts on the way. So we were going to be adding to the piles of stuff we already had. Every Christmas I estimate that I get about one cubic yard of gifts by volume. It's easy to see how, over the years, just from Christmas alone, you can accumulate things well beyond your ability to store or use them. And with the wedding gift bonanza it was going to be ten times worse.
Not only that, I’ve got a minimalist streak in me that I get from my father. I think he got his as a backlash effect from his father, who grew up during the Great Depression, which means that he doesn’t throw anything away. I mean anything. The man keeps those plastic six-pack holders. I kid you not. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It probably drove my dad crazy because he couldn’t find a simple screwdriver for the piles of milk jugs and bits or twine covering everything. As a result, he tries to keep the amount of junk to a minimum, as do I.
I also have a bit of the anti-consumerism bug in me. I fail miserably at this, I’m sure. I bet some person from Bangladesh would take one look at all of the shit I own and laugh his head off at the prospect of me being anti-consumerism. But I guess I mean “as compared to other Americans.”
Anyway, the answer to all of this was to have a garage sale. Not only could we get rid of piles of stuff we don’t want or use anymore, but we could make a little money too. We would also be clearing space for the gifts we were anticipating from Christmas and the wedding. We had decided that whatever we made we were going to put that directly in our wedding account. Some friends of mine recently had a garage sale and made a couple thousand bucks and an aunt had one where she made eight hundred. I knew we probably didn’t have as much stuff as they did, but still, making a few hundred dollars by selling unwanted crap made it worth doing.
So, right after Christmas we started going through everything we owned. The things that were going into the garage sale were getting piled in the garage. I immediately started rationalizing that I could upgrade a lot of items – compound bow, guitar, mountain bike – if I sold the crappy one I had. Of course, that’s a losing proposition and Audra convinced me that was the wrong approach, thankfully. Surprisingly, the exercise of going through everything I owned and deciding what to get rid of and what to keep gave me a sense of where I had been in life, where I was now and where I was going. I thumbed through old fly fishing magazines, flipped through clothes that I could remember where and when I’d bought them and sorted through all sorts of knick-knacks and trinkets that I’d accumulated from different places I’d been.
I agonized over certain items. The worst were my guitars. I had two – a Yamaha classical guitar and a Madeira acoustic. Neither were very expensive, but they were fairly old, especially the Yamaha, which was made from 1966-1974. My parents bought it when they were in college. I don’t think they ever learned how to play it. When I was in college I got interested in it and thought that I wanted to learn to play and I asked them for it. I tried to teach myself and I learned some chords and a few songs and riffs. I actually made up a few songs that I could play. I don’t have a good ear for music and I didn’t get very far teaching myself, but that guitar reminds me a lot of a certain period in my life so it was sort of symbolic to consider letting it go. The other one – the Madeira – had been left to me in 1998 by a roommate when he moved to Vermont to go to law school. It wasn’t an expensive guitar either, but it was easier to play than the Yamaha and I had enjoyed banging away on it every now and then. I got out of playing regularly even before I started law school, but I still liked having them around in case I was ever able to get serious about playing. Plus, I liked keeping the reminder of my early twenties around. In the end, I decided that I was past all of that and it was time to put my guitar-playing days behind me. It was a big step for me. I just decided it was a matter of being honest with myself. I was never very good at it and I would never have the time or devotion to get good at it. Playing guitar for me was something I tried in my search to discover who I was and what I was going to be. I walked down that path then chose another. It was something that never really took and never really became a part of who I was. Some people will have “guitar player,” in their obituaries but it wouldn’t be in mine. And I was okay with letting it go.
I had no idea how much the guitars were worth and I know that there are a lot of people out there who make money buying used instruments at garage sales for cents on the dollar because the owners simply have no idea. Well that ain’t me. I researched online and found both guitars. Each one was worth a maximum of $120. After thinking about it, I decided that the Yamaha wasn’t even technically mine since I more or less borrowed it from my parents. I asked my brother, Snake, if he wanted it since he is a guitar player. He said he did, so that was a done deal. I decided to ask 50% of the top market price for the Madeira and slapped a sign on it for sixty bucks.
There were a few other items that I really struggled with putting in the garage sale pile, but eventually I had gone through everything and Audra had too. A lot of things I was simply able to throw away. I got rid of four or five file boxes of papers from law school. Many things that were probably trash we decided to put in a “free” box thinking maybe someone would find a use for it. One day we spent a couple of hours putting price tags on everything. At that point, we still had a couple of drawers of stuff to go through, but we were pretty much ready. We just had to clear out the garage and set up tables and display everything.
I put an ad on Craigslist the Wednesday before our Saturday sale. I updated the listing on Friday so it would appear again. We bought a few signs and put them up on major thoroughfares around our neighborhood. Friday night I went to Home Depot and bought a couple of sheets of plywood and some sawhorses to use for tables to set things out on. I bought some big dowels that I hung from the rafters in the garage to hang clothes on. I arranged the sawhorse tables another plastic table we’d borrowed in a U shape around the walls of the garage. I put the best things toward the back so that people would have to walk past everything else to get to it. (Hey, I learned a few things about merchandising during my time in retail.) We set everything out and tried to group things by category. We had a sporting goods section and a kitchen section and an electronics section. All of the women’s clothes were in one area and the men’s in another. By the time we went to bed on Friday night just about everything was out and ready to go.
I had done some research online on “How to put on a successful garage sale.” My penchant for researching things like that is a result of law school and it drives Audra crazy. I even researched bowling before going out to play for only the second time in my life a couple of weeks ago. I knew a little bit about how garage sales worked because I’ve been a part of several in the past. There’s a whole garage sale culture out there and some people are deadly serious about it. I had a theory that there were people out there with shopping addictions and the healthiest way for them to feed their addiction was to buy stuff at garage sales. It was a lot cheaper than doing so at the Galleria. Others own their own secondhand stores and stock their shelves with items they find at garage sales. With ebay, I’m sure a lot of people troll for bargains on things they think they can mark up and make a profit selling online. For some, going to garage sales was a simple hobby – like treasure hunting. I have an aunt like that. She’s got some pretty amazing garage sale stories accumulated over a lifetime of garage-saling.
We got up Saturday morning at 6 so that we’d have time to go get some coffee and eat some breakfast and still have time to put some things out last-minute. Predictably, just as I was getting dressed, the doorbell rang. It was a little before 7. I opened the door and a woman standing there in a navy blue sweatsuit asked me if we were having a garage sale. I said yes, we were, but it wasn’t starting until 8. She asked me if we had any furniture. I said that we had a little, not much. Then she asked, just to confirm, that we weren’t starting until 8. I wasn’t rude or defensive, but I stood firm and told her that we weren’t going to start until 8. I knew good and well that I could’ve let her in to shop and that was just what she wanted. But I also knew that letting early birds in was a slippery slope and that if I did I’d never get any breakfast. You have to be strong when you put on a garage sale. The early bird went away.
We got our coffee and breakfast and went out to the garage to finish putting a couple of things out. We decided to open the doors at 7:35. There must have been people parked around our house waiting and their ears must be tuned to listen for the sound of a garage door opener, for no sooner had the door gone all the way up than a line of people appeared trudging on the sidewalk toward our garage. I was quickly trying to finish hooking up a stereo we were selling (the online guides tell you to plug in electric things to show people that they work – I already had a TV/VCR combo going with The Little Mermaid showing). I never got the stereo all the way hooked up because one of the first guys who came in looked around quickly and said he wanted to buy all of the electronics. As I was unhooking the stereo and TV he looked around at other stuff we had and he explained that his brother just got out of a halfway house and was moving into an apartment and had nothing. He also bought a cordless phone and a microwave.
As this was going on this older Mexican woman was frantically making a pile of things she wanted in the middle of the garage. She nearly threw me bodily away from the work I was doing unhooking the TV to get at a mobile phone that was still in the box that we were selling for ten bucks. (Another online tip is that things still the original box sell much better. Fortunately, I keep a lot of the boxes things come in.) Incidentally, Audra and I had talked a lot about all of the things we were selling – the things we agonized over putting in the garage sale in the first place and the things we thought would never sell. That mobile phone was a 2004 Samsung camera phone. It was the first cell phone I ever owned and I kept it in a leather case the entire time I owned it so it was in fabulous condition. I still had the box, which looked brand new, and a car charger. I marked the whole package for $10 and I told Audra that it was a super deal and that it would probably be the first thing sold.
On the other side, I had some tighty whities that I had gotten as a gag gift for a birthday while I was in law school (someone had wanted to make a joke about legal briefs). I never wore them, I ain’t like that, but how was a prospective purchaser to know that they had never been worn? I would never, ever consider buying underwear at a garage sale, didn’t think anyone else would either and considered just throwing them away. Audra clowned me for putting them in. But you know what? Those motherfuckers sold too! To some old man who called them “shorts.”
The first wave of people, who had all gotten there before our advertised opening time, were the professionals. They moved quickly, eyes darting about, trying to snatch the best deals before the competition could beat them to it. I wish I had been able to watch more, but I was busy helping people load their takings and making change and whatnot.
I suppose our garage sale was pretty typical. We had many of the regular characters that you would expect to see at any garage sale – the illegal immigrant contingent, the handyman looking for tools, the gun guy, the musician guy, the thrift store owner and then a smattering of people who can’t really be classified into any particular group; they were just weird.
One of these weirdos was this fat awkward nerdy kid. He was over six feet tall and pudgy; wearing a Virginia Tech shirt that had some slogan on it about the shootings. He looked to be in high school, but he told us later that he was only in eighth grade. He brought his own bags, which caught my attention and made me immediately suspicious. (The garage sale sites say that shoplifting at garage sales is rampant.) The first thing he did was ask me if we had any “technical equipment.” I asked him if he meant computers and components and he acted patronizing about it like, “Duh, what else would I mean?” He didn’t seem too disappointed when I told him that we didn’t have any of that kind of stuff. He started looking around. He picked up a camping compass and brought it over to me and asked, “Does this work quite well?” He threw the “quite” in there as an attempt to be formal, I guess. I didn’t flinch and just told him that it worked. In my mind, though, I was thinking, “A compass doesn’t work quite well; it’s all or nothing. It’s a magnet, some fluid and the north fucking pole and that’s it.” Then he’s circling our garage picking up this or that and mumbling, mostly to himself.
At one point he picked up a pair of airline earphones. They were still in their plastic package, unopened, and we had four or five pairs of them. He held one pair up to me and said with some surprise, “These aren’t opened! You paid for these!” I guess he couldn’t understand why we’d pay for something and then not use them. “Well,” I said, “they probably came free with the ticket.” He furrowed his brow and responded, “No, they don’t come free.” Then he added, “I’m, like, an expert.” If there was any doubt before that I was dealing with a borderline retard, it had been erased by that statement. For one, who is an expert on airline practices? If anyone, certainly not this fat nerdy kid. For two, I knew for a fact that I had gotten them for free. I mean, I’m not an expert, but I was fucking there. I’m not a frequent flier by any means, but on the dozen or so flights that I’ve been on that were long enough for a movie, I’ve been given the earphones for free. I may have had to pay for them once. However, I wasn’t about to argue with this kid. It wasn’t that important and I didn’t want to provoke him.
He hung around for at least a half hour, picking up various things and telling me and Audra and whoever else would listen what he would build with them. I had some nice brass bathroom plumbing fixtures that I had gotten when I worked at a hardware store in Austin and he kept saying how he could build a steam pump out of them, whatever a steam pump is. Then he picked up something that had an electric motor in it and talked about “parting it out.” Eventually, I picked up enough clues from his mumbling and weird statements to figure out that he liked to build things out of junk. I was going to let it go, but he just kept talking about all the shit he could build and finally Audra took the bait and asked him directly what kinds of things he built. “Fuck me,” I thought, “Here we go.”
He got all excited as he started in on his hobby. He explained that he subscribed to a magazine called “Make,” which is like some kind of tinkerer hobbyists’ rag. By extreme coincidence, Audra and I had just watched a show on PBS the night before called “Make” and we mentioned that to him. He got even more excited and went on to tell us that the show and the magazine were produced by the same people. He asked us what episode we had seen and he knew the one. (It was the one where the guy builds a chair out of shopping cart.) It was obvious to me that he was a bright kid. Hell, in certain narrow fields he might have been a genius. But, like many of his kind, he was extremely deficient in other areas.
He took a grooming hair trimmer that was still in the box off one of our shelves and asked me, “Tell me the truth; has this ever been used?” It was like he expected me to lie. This told me that he was truly a garage sale veteran, even at his tender age. I told him that yes, it had been used, but only a few times. I wanted to throw in “but never on the pubes” but that would have been a lie. It would have been a funny joke, but I held back because his reaction was too unpredictable. He put the trimmer in his bag.
He looked around a while longer and put a tie of mine and a shirt belonging to Audra’s dad in his bag. Eventually he came over to me and told me he was ready. I said cheerfully, “Okay, let’s total you out.” I stated the dollar amount of each item as I lifted it out of the bag. It came to $10.60. He opened his wallet (an orange leather one that he had gotten from a garage sale) and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. I could see in his wallet that he had a bunch of ones so I expected that he was going to give me eleven dollars. I called over to Audra to bring me forty cents change. He handed me the ten and then fumbled around in his wallet. He mumbled something about exact change and having a two dollar bill. I was holding the forty cents waiting for him to figure out the combination of bills he was going to give me. Then he put the ten back in his wallet, picked up his bag and held out his hand to accept the change and said, “Okay, thank you very much.” I just kind of looked at him for a second and then told him, “You haven’t given me the money yet.” He became immediately apologetic. “Oh, oh, I’m sorry.” He pulled out his wallet again and fished out a ten and a one and handed them to me. I gave him the forty cents. “I’m sorry about that. I thought I did.” He picked up his bags and walked out of the garage. I watched him walk down the street.
Now, I’m a person who usually gives people the benefit of the doubt. I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy when it comes to people. But I feel pretty strongly that this fat nerdy kid tried to fuck me over. I thought it over for a second and walked over to Audra and told here what had happened. My mind raced and I came to the conclusion that the kid makes a hobby of going to garage sales and pulling the “hand you the twenty then ask for it back and demand change for the twenty” trick everywhere he went. He probably read about the con on some Spy vs. Spy bullshit nerd website. I wonder how many people had fallen for that. If you think about it, the odds are probably pretty good that he could get away with it. People like us running garage sales aren’t jaded retail store managers who deal with shoplifters and thieving employees all the time and prosecute them as a simple matter of course. We’re not used to dealing with people stealing from us. This isn’t a business; this is our home. People, as a rule, want to avoid conflict. So even if they suspected something like this was happening to them, they are likely to just let it go to avoid the confrontation. What this fat turd didn’t bargain for was that I thrive in conflict. I defy the odds on that one and I called his ass out without a second thought.
The second reason this trick might work a lot of the time is the confusion factor. Things get busy during a garage sale. There are as many as a dozen people in a confined space and you are being asked questions and trying to total people’s purchases and make change and do all of the math right. In the back of your mind you are trying to watch everyone to make sure people aren’t just walking out with an armload of stuff without paying. There’s a lot going on and it would be easy to get confused. The confusion increases the benefit of the doubt factor. So even though you might suspect that someone was ripping you off, because you knew you were busy and confused you might just chalk it up to that. Not me. When it comes to transactions and money, especially in that setting, I’m not going to get distracted. I knew I never had the money in hand. Period.
Again, I think my experiences as a lawyer helped me out here. I’m used to people, usually other lawyers, trying to sneak little details into deals or conveniently forgetting to tell me about some issue that would tilt the deal in their favor. The difference between a favorable and unfavorable outcome is sometimes razor thin and I know this. So I am very careful about shit like that and the odds of somebody sneaking something past me are pretty low.
Another weirdo was this shifty little Arab guy. He came in and quickly picked out a coffee maker that we had, still in the box. We had it marked for $4. He asked us to take $3. Now, the haggling thing is probably the worst part about hosting a garage sale. I don’t really like haggling and neither does Audra. We had marked the prices on things to be lower than we thought we could get in part because we didn’t want to haggle. Of course, the shoppers don’t know that so they are going to haggle anyway. We had decided the night before that our rule was that we weren’t going to mark down any prices until after noon. It wasn’t even 9 when this Arab dude came in. We told him that we weren’t doing any markdowns until after noon. But he persisted. Eventually we let him have the fucking coffee maker for $3. Then he picked up a Timex Ironman watch that I had (still in the box). The price tag was still on the box for $69.95 and I had it marked for $5. The watch was dead because it needed a battery and I had even put a label on it telling people that. Five bucks was a steal for this watch, but this guy asked us to take $3. “No,” I said, “That was a seventy dollar watch! We’re just giving it away for $5!” (The online guides say that you should mark your prices at anywhere from 20-10% of retail value of the item.) He didn’t give up and kept asking for a lower price. “$3?” I shook my head. “$3?” he asked again. I shook my head again and told him again about our no markdowns until noon policy. “$4?” This guy was relentless.
I wouldn’t have given it to him for $4 except that we had had an African couple in before who looked at the watch. They had asked for a discount on it and we’d told them no. They’d been persistent too but we didn’t back down and they walked without buying it. That caused me to rethink the markdown policy. We should have marked our prices a full dollar more on everything to give us more room to bargain. Live and learn.
So now the guy had our coffee maker and my watch, originally priced at $10 total, down to $7. Then he went for the guitar. He asked me if it was a good guitar and I told him that it was in perfect condition, that it wasn’t very expensive new but that I’d seen it for sale online for $120 – all true. I could tell from some of the things he was saying that he didn’t know shit about guitars. He asked me to mark it down to $50 and I told him flatly, “Absolutely not. That guitar is worth every bit of $60 and more.” The fat nerdy kid chimed in, “That’s a good guitar. I’d be sorry to see it go.” “Thanks, kid,” I thought. The shifty Arab put the guitar down and looked around at our other stuff. But he went back to the guitar and picked it up. He pleaded with me, “Please, I am a teacher. I want to give it to a student.” I’m thinking, “Teacher? Is that a basis for charity?” Fuck that. This squirrely motherfucker was just trying to fuck me and I was starting to get sick of him. So I told him, “I’ll tell you what, I’ve got this digital tuner that I’ve marked for $5 that I think should go with the guitar. I’ll throw it in for free if you pay $60. But that’s it.” “$55?” he says, just a bit sheepishly. Shameless motherfucker. “Fine,” I said, disgusted. He asked me to write “Sold” on the tag on the guitar, which I did.
We totalled up all of his items and it came to $71. “$70?” he asked. Unbelievable. I let him have it just to get the wretch out of there. Then the icing on the fucking cake – he hands me $15 and tells me it’s a “deposit” because he has to go get the rest of the money. I looked at him, incredulous. After all that and he wants me to hold this shit for him so he can go get the money? I said to him, “I’ll take your deposit, but I’m putting that guitar back in case someone else wants to buy it.” He says, “But it’s sold.” That’s when I looked him in the eye and told him in my most menacing tone,”It’s not sold until I have the money.” And he knew I meant it. "You have one hour to get back here." I half expected him not to come back, but he did, and he gave Audra $55.
Sometime between when the shifty Arab left and came back to pay, Audra came over to where I’m standing and asks me, “Where’s my bag of rings?” I don’t know what she’s talking about. “My bag of rings. I just put them out. They were right here.” She pointed to a spot on a table where the “jewelry department” was located. I told her that I never saw them. Her face gets flushed and she says, “If someone took them either they just left or they are still here.” The shifty Arab had just left and the only people who were still there were the fat nerdy kid and a couple of Mexican immigrant women who were in the back looking at clothes. At that time I didn’t figure the fat nerdy kid for a thief and there was little opportunity for the Mexicans to have taken them since they had just walked up. That left the shifty Arab. Audra was convinced that he had taken her bag of rings. I explained that there was nothing we could do about it because we hadn’t seen him do it and he was long gone anyway. I postulated that he had taken the rings straight to a pawn shop to get the $55 he was going to bring back to us. There were some silver rings in the bag, but fortunately they weren’t worth a whole lot. Audra said she would have marked them at $10 total, so it wasn’t a great loss. But still, it pissed us off, especially to think it was the shifty Arab.
There were a few other characters that showed up, but none as notable as the fat nerdy kid and the shifty Arab. We sold 75-80% of what we put out, including many items that we never thought would sell. The afternoon was pretty slow, but we had a few stragglers right up until 3 when I finally closed the garage door. We loaded up what remained and took it to Goodwill. Then we took the plywood and sawhorses back to Home Depot. (You gotta love the Oriental Rental.) We counted up our profits and we’d made nearly $500! All told, a pretty interesting experience.
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