There’s still plenty of snow on the ground and our high temperatures are only between ten and fifteen degrees most days, but we’ve had two garage sales in Grand Forks during the last two weeks.
The first was held indoors by one of our local churches. While the sale officially began at 8:00 in the morning, for $2 you could buy early buyers rights beginning an hour early at 7:00. I got there about 6:30 and there were already fourteen people in line ahead of me. By the time they opened the door at 7:00 there were between 100 and 150 people standing in line clutching their $2 in their hand.
We were in the middle of a heat wave and the temperature was in the twenties with no wind so standing in line wasn’t bad. When they held their sale one year ago temps were below zero with a twenty to twenty-five mile an hour wind so it was a lot more pleasant this year.
The pickings weren’t as good this year as in previous years. The two best items I purchased were The Essence Of Success by Earl Nightingale and The Day That Turns Your Life Around by Jim Rohn that sold for $89.99 and $36.99 respectively. My investment in the two was $8.00 for the two plus what I paid for shipping since I listed them with “Free Shipping”.
The second sale, a week later, was held in a storage locker. I only purchased one thing there - 24 books from the Tales From Grace Chapel Inn series. I paid $20 for these and they sold for $175.00. These were offered with “Free Shipping” also.
You likely noticed all three of those items were listed in eBay’s “Fixed Price” format. I’ve been playing with this for roughly the last two months and will be writing about how I’ve been doing it and what my results have been sometime soon.
On a different note, about a week ago, Marty Weil interviewed magazine collector Steven Lomazow. The interview contains a link to Steven’s great blog, Magazine History: A Collector’s Blog. If you are at all interested in old magazines and their history I suggest you explore it and either add it to your RSS feed or subscribe to get new posts by email.
Photograph by Solaro.
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February 17th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
Unfortunately, the pictures and details about “Tales from Grace Chapel Inn” are gone already. Could you tell us more? Was this a complete set? How was the condition?
I am going to have to stop turning my nose up at motivational material. I gave away as worthless at least a set of audiotapes from a carload of books given to me: “Who’d pay for this?” I think I still have a few motivational books from that batch somewhere in my room of unlisted books.
February 18th, 2009 at 12:53 am
I just clicked on the link in the blog post and everything is still there. Perhaps there was a glitch somewhere along the line when you tried looking at them. If the link still doesn’t work for you, you can see them by doing a search on eBay for auction 380102999037.
A lot of motivational/self help stuff does quite well on eBay. A lot of it was never published in print format but was only available on cassettes, CDs, or DVDs. These days the sets of cassettes don’t usually do real well, but the CDs and DVDs often do.
Gary H.
February 19th, 2009 at 11:46 am
I’m very interested to hear about your fixed price experiments - I have been wondering if I should try doing 30 day fixed priced listings instead of one week auctions on items I think will only get one bid - which is probably at least half the things I list at auction!