So You Want to Have a Yard Sale

Partial view, after the morning rush

​Every time I have a yard sale, I swear I'll never do it again. It tends to take about five years to forget how dumb I think yard sales are, and then I hold another one and remember. I'm in the middle of one right now, so I'll share how it's been going. I have plenty of time, because only one person has come in the last hour and a half.

We've made $109 in three and a half hours so far. That works out to $31.14 an hour.* Divide that by two people, why don't you? This has been the first really beautiful sunny spring weekend of the year, and we could be walking our dog at the duck pond, but instead we're both hanging out in the driveway trying to sell our old junk.

I put up ads on Craigslist and Nextdoor, plus a couple of big neon poster board signs on the corners near our house. The ads listed roughly the categories of stuff we were selling: tools, housewares, kitchen stuff, games, fabric and crafts. I clearly wrote '10-5' on the signs and put 'please, no early birds' in my ads. This means that people started coming only a little over an hour early instead of 7 AM. By 10:00 there were about eight people lined up at our gate waiting.

What this means for you is that you should have price tags on every single item before going to bed the night before your sale. We started setting up at 8:30 and it really wasn't enough time to haul everything out and set up tables. Plus, we were constantly being interrupted by people calling questions from the gate. (They are looking for specific things like furniture, electronic games, baby stuff, or collectibles, and if you don't have what they want, they'll leave).

Until I finally shut the garage door, every single person who came wanted to look around in the garage. This is a universal law. People will make insultingly low offers for the stuff you actually use, such as your appliances, vehicles, bikes, tools, camping equipment, and, of course, the folding tables you are using for the sale. Har de har har.

I priced almost everything at one dollar. A few larger items were marked at $2 or $3, and my husband priced out his shop tools and garden tools, mostly in the $5 and $10 range. At these prices, some people were still willing to walk away empty-handed even after showing interest. Don't expect to make more than 1970's yard sale prices for your stuff. We had three large boxes marked 'FREE' and most of that stuff is still sitting there. You can hardly give it away. When people make an offer, we say yes.

Our motivation for holding a yard sale is that we're moving. We're also (spoiler alert!) getting rid of our car later this week. We didn't want to have to pack, haul, store, and unpack extra boxes of stuff, much less buy the moving boxes for the extra stuff. Anything that anyone buys (or takes away for free) is one less item we have to arrange to discard. I got a message about a church fundraiser for a cause I support, which is building housing in the Third World, and we can drop off anything that's left over afterward. Hopefully there will only be one carload by then.

A few things on the tables right now are items that failed to sell on eBay for 99 cents.

The thing is, our stuff isn't worth anything. Neither is yours - no offense. Everyone already has four houses' worth of stuff crammed into one house already. Everyone already HAS a kitchen full of stuff they don't use, a garage full of stuff they don't use, and closets full of stuff they don't use - some of which they bought at someone else's yard sale. You almost have to pay people to take it.

Material possessions tend to be surrounded by fallacies and cognitive bias. We fall for the 'sunk cost' fallacy every time, paying higher rents to continue to store stuff we don't use because we can't bear to let it go. We think the stuff we own has appreciated but that other people's virtually identical stuff is worth only those 1970s prices. I'll sell you my old coffee mug for $12.99 but I'm not paying more than fifteen cents for yours, buddy.

The only thing that is true is that stuff is worth its usefulness to us. If we are not using it, it has zero worth. If we are paying for a storage unit, or for a room in our house that is only used to store junk, then our stuff has a NEGATIVE VALUE. When we found that we would have to pay an extra thousand dollars a month in rent to get a place with a garage in our new city, we understood that it was time to downsize. Even the garage. Even tools. Even stuff we like and use that's in great condition. We're not going to have a yard anymore, not for the foreseeable future, and storage units in our area are going for $200-$300 a month. Eff that. That's our vacation money!

We're in a 728-square-foot house already, one that came with a garage and a laundry room. We'll most likely wind up in a little condo or apartment. That's what it's like when you want to live near the beach. Many people would say (even if nobody is asking them) that I COULD NEVER DO THAT. We believe we can't live in a small space because we think our material possessions are actually body parts. They are organs that we need in order to biologically function. We cannot cognitively process the effort of imaging ourselves without our clutter, stuff, and junk. The reality is that we really only need a bed, a couch, a functioning kitchen, some towels, our electronics, and three weeks' worth of clothes for each season. I say 'functioning' kitchen, but most people's kitchens are not functional at all. Rate your home by whether your meal prep, laundry, housework, and financial systems are working in your life, not by how much you think your belongings are 'worth.'

Grand finale: Between 2 and 3 PM, only one person came by, and he spent $1. Not a single person came between 3 and 5. We made a total of $146 in 7 hours, for a return of $20.85 an hour, again divided by two people. Considering what we both earn per hour in the marketplace, it was sheer unadulterated lunacy for us to waste our weekend on this kind of activity. Price your free time at double the rate you earn at your job, unless of course you hate having free time.

If we had this sale to do over again, for the purpose of having fewer donations to pack into our car, we would have run it from 9 AM to noon and quit after that. We only made $37 in the three hours between 2 and 5. We could have had our sale, dropped off donations, and gone to the park for the rest of the day, or lounged around reading, or really anything other than wishing and hoping someone would come and pay us for our old junk.

We did donate a carload of stuff to the charity rummage sale, and no, not everything fit in one load. We'll take another one or two carloads over tomorrow before we get rid of our car. It's time to shift gears from 'how much could we get for this' to 'they need it more than we do.'

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