When the weather gets mild and beautiful as it’s starting to do this month, we begin to see garage sales multiplying along the streets and roads of Simpson County.
I don’t shop at garage sales myself, already being the owner of plenty of chipped, frayed and useless merchandise. But when I work up my courage and can talk myself into parting with some of those treasures, I have conducted a couple of sales. The last one I had was about 10 years ago.
I got up in the dark that morning, following my husband’s admonition to get the show on the road early. I was barely dressed and had gone to set a dirty dustpan on the carport to throw away later, thinking that I would then go in and brew a nice cup of coffee to warm myself up while I got my thoughts together. Seeing a car nosing up our long driveway with its lights on I thought, Oh, good. The paper lady. I can read the news while I drink my coffee.
“Here’s your first customer,” my husband said. “Can’t be!” I replied. “It’s just a little after midnight! Isn’t that the paper lady?”
No, turns out he was right. Shoppers do come early for garage sales. People who can’t get to work on time and who drift in to a 9 a.m. Sunday school class at 9:20 arrived in the pre-dawn to paw over the stuff spread out over our carport, though I could hardly see how to make change for them in the dark.
The “professionals” came first, trying to get all the good stuff, meaning anything that could pass for a collector’s item or an antique, before anyone else snapped it up. What do they do with these things? I wondered if I could drive by some garage sales the next weekend and find any of my own sale items marked up a little and being hawked as antiques.
The psychology of garage sale shoppers amazes me. Women who won’t sit through a football game if the temperature drops below 75 degrees had bundled up against the 30 degree cold that morning to wander among the cast off furniture and doggy-stained rugs. I feared I didn’t have anything worthy of such heroic, intrepid bargain hunters.
Apparently I did have “attractive merchandise,” but it wasn’t what I would have thought. The psychological makeup of garage sale shoppers causes them to snatch up what seems most out of style, dirty or useless. One woman bought my filthy dustpan that was destined for the garbage! She passed up the good stuff I thought would go first, but I made a quarter on the dustpan.
They haggle over give-away prices and don’t bat an eye at overpaying for some gaudy thing that Aunt Maudie Mae should have known not to give me in the first place.
I watched to see what did sell, in case I ever nerved myself up enough to go through this ordeal again.
They bought the things that gave evidence of our changing stages of life: our son’s heavy metal music tapes left behind with his adolescence, a typewriter that had succumbed to the computer era, boxes of board games from the days when we had time to play Sorry and Monopoly.
They bought the evidence of changing styles: the 90s Old European do-dads, the 1979 brass chandelier from our old dining room and the 1980s dangling earrings the size of saucers.
They bought things I would only buy new, like bedding and towels. One friend of mine used to sell her old underwear at her garage sales, but somehow the thought of someone pawing through my used Fruit-of-the-Loomers was too embarrassing to contemplate.
They bought some of my “mistakes” and lessons too. One lady bought the food chopper that came in 427 pieces, not one of which went back together right after being disassembled. It chopped an onion in 15 seconds, just as advertised, but it took 30 minutes to assemble and another 15 to wash. I think we used it twice. So with the chopper and ingredients, each serving of the salsa we made cost about $37.50.
Someone bought the rabbit jacket I bought to wear to Switzerland in 1982. It was warm, but I left a trail of white fur from Jackson to Geneva, and I left everyone in Switzerland sneezing.
Someone also bought the down comforter I had purchased that was SO thick and SO warm for a MERE $50! Of course, it didn’t take us long to realize that my bargain was TOO thick and TOO warm for our mild Mississippi winters. We sweated under it for two weeks before I shoved it under the bed with my other “consumer lessons.” Hopefully, the person who bought it is cold-natured.
About 1 p.m., when the bargain hunters had dwindled, I did what I always have an uncontrollable urge to do before the sale is even over. I called a charity to pick up the remains, locked the doors, and headed to the mall to spend my day’s take on more stuff.
So what if my new treasures turn out to be mistakes? I’ll have plenty of “quality merchandise” for my next sale!
