10 Rules for a Successful Garage Sale

From Kelly Vandever:

My dear friend Sandy Weaver is a garage sale aficionado!  

Sandy sent me this list of 10 Rules for a Successful Garage Sale that I share with you below.

Sandy personally helped me with my own garage sale a few years back and recently paired up with her brother to hold a massive garage sale together.  Wonderful human being and profligate writer that she is, Sandy captured her thoughts and shared them with me in the paragraphs below.

After she sent me this wonderful article, I asked her for her observation about their results.  She estimated around 50-60% of all the items they had out were sold.  The sale was held on a Friday, Saturday and Sunday with most of the items selling on Friday.  Saturday was the second best day and Sunday was the slowest day.  If you only have one day to sell, Sandy recommends Friday.  She shared that all the large items sold and she said it's key to price items well so that they move.  She also emphasized that it's important to have a plan for what to do with the items that don’t sell, especially if you don’t want them to come back into the house.

And now, read for yourself Sandy’s words of wisdom... 

10 Rules for a Successful Garage Sale

By Sandy Weaver

1. The first rule of garage sales is that if you don’t have a sense of humor, you probably shouldn’t try to hold a sale. You will have all kinds of people stopping in, most of them fun and some of them not so fun. If you like to play with people, your garage sale will give you a lot of opportunities. You’ll meet neighbors you haven’t met before, deal with delightful people you’d never meet otherwise, and you might even make a new friend or two. You’ll also have people who are grumpy and unpleasant, who will insult your merchandise and complain about your prices. Water off a duck’s back, and you are the duck. If you can’t be the duck, you might want to reconsider having a garage sale.
2. The second rule of garage sales is don’t try to have one by yourself. You’ll need at least one other person to help you answer questions, keep an eye on things while you take bio breaks, or get something from inside the house. Garage sales are lots more fun when you have two or three other people who are doing it with you. Let your neighbors know you’re planning a sale – maybe they’ll want to come and set some of their things up and sell with you. The more different kinds of merchandise you have, the more likely you are to sell stuff.
3. The third rule of garage sales is you’re doing it to get rid of stuff, not to get rich. Let people get bargains…price your things as low as you can without giving them away. You’ll make more money with low prices than you will with higher prices. People come to garage sales for a variety of reasons: they’re very low-income and need to spend as little as possible, they’re just starting off in their new home and need a lot of things, they’re collectors looking for affordable ways to grow their collection, or they have a resale/antique store and are looking for items they know their customers will purchase from them. Keep your prices low and all these people will be happy to buy from you. Leave room for people to bargain – if you’d like to sell something for $10, price it at $15. On the last day, be prepared to either keep the item or let it go for $7. Remember, you’re doing the sale to get rid of stuff. Be a good Disney princess – “let it go, let it go!”
4. Once you know the weekend you’ll hold the sale, start working at least a week before to get organized. You’ll need lots of tables and/or shelves, so buy, borrow, or build a bunch. You can price things individually, post a sign for each group of related items (i.e.: “All clothing $2), or set up a hold table and let people make a pile of what they’d like, and you give them one low price for everything. If you want to put individual prices on everything, consider starting two weeks before your sale to get it all done.
5. Decide how you wish to be paid – will it be cash only, cash, PayPal/Venmo/Zelle/CashApp, will you accept checks? Make a sign to hang on the front of the sales table listing your payment policies. Pro Tip: make your minimum price $1 – dealing with coins is a pain in the bee-hind! For little things, consider telling people they can get two or three things for $1.
6. Decide early what your hours will be on the days you plan to hold your sale and put the hours in your advertising. You can advertise in hyper-local online groups on FaceBook, NextDoor, Reddit, etc. as well as on local outlets you may know of (community bulletin boards, etc.) Consider ending earlier on your last day to give you time (and energy!) to pack up whatever’s left over. Understand that if you say in your advertising that the sale starts at 8, people will start showing up at 6:30 on your first day. If you’re not outside, they might wait or might not. If you’re outside still getting organized and are set up enough to allow it, let them shop. Many of them will tell you exactly what they’re looking for, making it easy to help them spend money with you…or not. These are the people most likely to help you if you need help moving something or uncovering your tables, and are also people who go to a lot of sales. They came to buy…if you’re outside and tell them you’re not ready and ask them to come back, they probably won’t…they’ll be off to the next sale.
7. Put your signs out early on the first day of your sale, or late afternoon/ early evening the day before. Start taking your signs down an hour before you want to close the sale on the last day. This is where having at least one other person is vital – they can do “sign duty” while you’re setting up and running the sale. Pro Tip: When setting signs out, begin at your house and fan out. When taking signs down, take the farthest-away ones down first and move in towards your house. 
8. Keep signs consistent and plentiful and useful. Two words – “yard sale” – along with directional arrows is all the sign truly needs. Don’t make people have to stop to read your sign…just keep pointing them towards where the sale is. Don’t make them go more than half a mile or two stop signs (whichever comes first) without a sign pointing the way, and NEVER leave a corner where they’ll need to turn sign-less. Do signs from each major road that is near your home to get the most eyeballs on your signs, which will give you the most potential customers. If your directional signs suck, so will your sale. 
9. Use a big sign at your home to let people know they’re in the right place, especially if your sale is hard to see from the street. On the back side of the big sign, write a “closed – please come back tomorrow at (whatever time you’re starting)” so people know that your sale is available to them the next day. 
10. If you have a driveway, block it with a sawhorse, which is a great place to hang that big sign. You want to block the driveway because: people will block each other in, causing friction and spats that you’ll have to referee; people might park and/or drive on your lawn to avoid being blocked in or to escape from being blocked in; when you’re selling large items, you need an open driveway that the purchaser can drive into so they can load their large items.

Another note from Kelly – See, what did I tell you?!  Sandy is awesome to share such great information, isn’t she!

To find out more about Sandy, and the astonishing work she does, go to https://www.centerforworkplacehappiness.com/