I like going to them... I've had some good luck getting some pieces of furniture for cheap. I got a China cabinet at one that was only a couple of blocks away from my house, so the seller offered to truck it over to my place for me. I also got a miniature China cabinet at another for only $20 that I'm now using as my liquor cabinet; glasses go into the top shelves behind the glass doors, and the liquor bottles go in the cabinets below.
I also get a lot of CDs and books at the sales I go to. Usually I rip the CDs and add them to my ever-growing music collection; I now have an external 1 TB drive (only 300 GB is being used, however) to hold my music. And all of the CDs I ripped the music from is filling up a bookcase that I got at Ikea (maybe I'll look for another bookcase at this summer's sales
).
The only thing that I don't like is that so many of the sales just have baby items. I understand that kids outgrow their clothes and toys well before those items fall apart from use, but since I don't have any kids of my own, it usually ends up as a wasted trip following the signs only to turn around as soon as I get to the sale. One summer, a local radio station had an app that held different sales that people had going on along with different categories of items for sale; this app was very useful since I could narrow my search down to only those sales that listed furniture and / or CDs. But last summer, the station didn't have it anymore. Not sure if it just became too much work behind the scenes collecting all of that data
.
I've been to a few sales that I found quite interesting, mostly for why they were having a sale... I went to one sale and I could swear that the person is an extreme couponer... All of the items for sale were unopened health and beauty stuff that you'd find at a store. I got several bottles of Axe bodywash for $1 each and a ton of packages of gum for 10-cents each. At a different sale, the person had an E-Bay store -- he posted signs and had flyers giving the URL to get to his store. All of the prices tagged on the items at his sale were the "Buy It Now" price on E-Bay, so whenever anyone bought an item at his sale, he had to go to his laptop and "purchase" the item from E-bay (or somehow remove it from his online store). I finally went to one that had a T-shirt printing press in their basement. They'd just get different ideas for T-shirts, purchase a ton of blank T-shirts, and then print out a bunch to sell at their sale. I think they had a special of 4 for $20, so I bought 4 for myself.
I've had a sale of my own once, but I doubt I'll do that again. I hardly made any money, and when you factor in the expenses for signs, price stickers, etc. it wasn't worth it. I'm thinking next time I'll just donate the items and use the donation as a tax write-off. Less hassle and I'll probably make as much as I would just trying to sell it.
Community Forum
Topic: do you like garage sales? (Read 3468 times)
July 06, 2010, 04:40:44 am
