Cha-Ching: Amature and Professional Garage Sales
Submitted by My Garden Spot Blog
With the warm weather of the last few weeks (other than the week of RAIN, yippee!), the Spring sport of garage sales is in full force. Most of the sales are held by one family or a group of families. Others though, have a more…professional look. One of the give aways is that they don’t use the traditional cigar box, or cookie tin to keep the money safe. The professional sale will often have a cash drawer, and a full amount of change to break even largish bills.
Some of the professional sales are stocked by people going to family garage sales. There, they negotiate a really low price for a lot of the better goods and load up and go. These, women mostly, have little time to waste and are intent on getting to as many sales as possible in as little time as possible. As the day goes on, they’ll have fewer choices in the sales, but the prices will have gone down too, as the families are usually ready to shut down and be done with it all by noon.
The neighbors of these professional garage sales are not usually happy about their neighbor’s commercial activities. One garage sale a month might be over looked. When it gets to having one every weekend, the gig is up and everyone knows what’s going on, and often, it is not what the neighborhood wants to happen.
The problems include an increase in traffic on weekend mornings, just when children would be going out to play, or the parents going out for a walk. Another, perhaps not as obvious inconvenience, is that the customers of the garage sale occasionally include those who are less than upstanding, and take the opportunity to note which houses are empty for the weekend and who might have things laying about that might… walk away.
There are very few benefits of having a permanent neighborhood garage sale. Mostly, the drawbacks of traffic, strangers in the neighborhood and the annoyance of it all is why Home Owners Associations will shut the garage sales down when they’re discovered.
