Everything must go!

This past weekend I helped a friend out with a yard sale and boy, was it an eye opener. I've always thought of yard sales as pretty low key, people who happen to be driving by stop in, have a quick glance over all the unwanted junk (aka their soon-to-be treasures) you've accumulated needlessly over the years, and fork over 25 whole cents (negotiated down from 50 cents mind you) for that broken coffee mug/annoyingly noisy child's toy/unidentified object that supposedly does something in the kitchen and may or may not work depending on the day of the week and the weather. Simple enough hmm?

But not so! Apparently the whole process starts with the media, putting an ad in the newspaper the week before (whatever happened to barely legible homemade signs at the end of the street?) so that those who are organised wake up at 5am on Saturday morning and know that something exciting in happening in your suburb. Then, while you're still struggling to get everything out onto the water logged lawn without collapsing a vertebrae, the dealers (scary, scary people!) arrive, an hour before you've planned to start, demanding to know prices. Unbelievably, at one point we actually had to shoo them out of the house as they tried to tag every family heirloom between them and the door .

The good news, once these mercenary individuals were gone, the yard sale settled into a comforting routine, with twenty people showing up at once to goodnaturedly haggle about the overpriced Wiggles video, then everyone disappearing, bag of pre-loved purchases in tow, to give us a few minutes breather before the next crowd arrived. Of course, as the Saturday morning faded into afternoon, even these crowds thinned out, and suddenly we found ourselves out with the black marker, re-pricing everything to about a tenth of its original price in the desperate hope that we wouldn't end up making too many trips to goodwill at the end of the day.

The wisdom I gained from the day? When it seems there are no more customers to be had, the best course of action is to have one of your crew fake looking around - it works a treat! The logic seems to be "If someone else is looking, there must be something worthwhile in there somewhere." Clearly, by three o'clock, this is a lie, as all the good stuff has gone hours before, but it's amazing how people can trick themselves into believing a cracked rice steamer or a scratched "Swamp Tigers" DVD is the very thing missing from their hitherto incomplete lives.

Fun hmm? =] But hey, I made $80 so I'm not complaining (ahhh, how far I've come from the days of selling barbie doll clothes for 10cents each and being happy with a $3 taking). Now to figure out how I'm going to spend it...