Just a few miscellaneous thoughts about my first weekend of serious garage saling.
Friday began at 5:30 am when I left the house for the 110 mile drive to Barnesville, Minnesota for the first day of their Spring City-Wide Garage Sale. It was a little cool when I left in the morning but by the time I got to Barnesville it had warmed up enough so that the shorts I was wearing were comfortable all day.
The “official” sale list and map showed 60 sales, but there had to be at least another 20 to 30 people who didn’t bother to get their sale on the list. While I didn’t buy as much as I did at their Fall Sale last year, there was still plenty of interesting stuff available. It took me between six and seven hours to cover them all and I came home with enough new inventory to definitely make the trip worthwhile.
Saturday was a little different. My list of new sales in Grand Forks contained only three sales. Saturday was a jeans, sweatshirt, and vest day and when I left home at 7:30 in the morning I had to brush the snow off the car windows before I got started.
All of my purchases Saturday came from one sale. I bought 2 DVD sets of the first and second season of the TV show “Altered Development” and Karen Kingsbury’s four volume “Sunrise” series set; all for a total of $6.
Two of the sales were church sales, one of which charged $2 early buyers fee for the first hour of the sale. I came away empty-handed from that one.
Early buyers fees have become commonplace with church and large group sales in Grand Forks in the last two to three years. However, on Friday there was a normal, one family, sale in town that charged people a $1 entry fee for the first hour of the sale.
I didn’t go because I’d gone to Barnesville, but in my opinion charging someone to get into a garage sale consisting of nothing but used furniture, clothing, and children’s toys is taking it a little too far. It would have been interesting to have been there for the first hour and been able to see just how many people ponied up their dollar to get in.
My best purchase of the weekend may likely turn out being a group of 100 RCA and Hallicrafters TV, radio, and record player spec. and parts sheets from the early 1950s that I bought at one of the sales in Barnesville for $10. They will likely take some time to sell, but I’ll list them either in my store or in the fixed price format for $9.99 each and see what happens.
Photograph by John Beagle
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