We priced a ton of junk we've got around the house, along with some items that we've been keeping with the intention of giving to someone at some point, LoL. I bought some stakes and posterboard and we made signs. I blew up some balloons to draw attention to those signs. I put an advertising post up on Craigslist and Jonathan and I priced everything with stickers or put items in boxes marked "$1" or "25 cents" etc.

The only true surprise came about 11:30am, when we realized that we had had some theft. At no point was the yard sale unattended by at least one of us, and 75% or more of the time, all three of us were present. Yet, somehow people managed to walk off with several items. We're only aware of four stolen things, though there may be more that we just didn't notice missing (all in all we had probably 150 or so items out). One was a broken digital camera that we were selling for $10, since someone could probably fix it or scrap it for parts. It was in a case and I had talked about it to someone earlier in the morning. At some point it was pulled from its case and disappeared. Not a big loss, since it didn't work anyway. But I only noticed this after Jim discovered someone had stolen a DVD player he had for sale! That's a large item to walk off with! At first we were baffled over how this could have happened (a camera can fit in a pocket... but a DVD player can't!!), but we remembered that there was a point where we had 10 or 12 people looking at our stuff, so we couldn't have watched all 20+ hands at the same time I guess. The other two thefts were dumb... the sticky-fingered fool didn't know what he was taking and stole half of two different items... so neither will do him any good. Of course, that leaves us with two halves of items which does us no good, LoL.
Overall, it was a success. We were able to sell a lot of stuff that we don't need, and we're planning to do another one in six weeks or so, since we now have an idea of what to expect, and we'll plan to get the signs up the night before and whatnot to increase traffic.
Hello Jonathan & Amy,
ReplyDeleteIf you ever come across broken stuff you can
list it free with a picture on my website.
www.BrokenEquipment.com
Thanks,
Ed Soltan