"Can we get rid of this Ayatollah T-shirt? Khomeini died years ago."
I’ve been to a lot of garage sales over the past couple of years. A good percentage* of the kids’ clothes came second-, third-, or more-hand from garage sales. Recently we gave back to the rummagers with our own garage sale. Well, not really “gave,” but our prices were so low it was like we were giving it away.
My sudden call to action was spurred on by our neighborhood garage sale. A few of our neighbors are moving and wanted to minimize the number of boxes they have to pack, move, and store in their new home basement until their kids are old enough to clean out the basement as punishment.
Our basement is fast approaching the tipping point of containing too much crud to navigate, and I’d like to sell some of it. But I can’t sell my old video game systems that may or may not work anymore because they hold too many happy childhood memories, where “childhood” is defined as “the time in my life up to about two years ago.” The same excuse applies to my comic books. Those old college textbooks I should save in case I ever need to look up something about using Excel 5. That leaves old baby stuff as the only things I can sell.
We’re comfortable selling old baby items because we’re done having children, as in “snip, snip, tie, tie” done. Unless God has a sense of humor about this things, which (s)he probably does. We can sell the bouncy seats since the boys now have too much mobility to stay in them. We can sell a rocking chair since it was just a fantasy all along that we could sit and rock a baby without the other baby screaming or the toddler climbing into our laps. We can sell that awful high chair that I bought cheap at a rummage sale under the assumption that any high chair will work. Most of all, we can sell clothes.
The old baby clothes have overtaken one corner of our basement. We have six sizes worth of old girl’s clothes (seven sizes if you count 2T and 24-months as separate sizes even though they’re really not), and two sizes worth of old boy’s clothes, unisex clothes, and girl’s clothes that I just think can be unisex. We also have old preemie and newborn size clothes, but I doubt those would sell at a garage sale; no one really buys super-small clothes ahead of time in expectation of a preemie, and anyone with a baby that small probably isn’t rummaging anyway.
My job was to price the clothes. Ellie suggested dumping everything into bins with one price, but I know that clothes have to be spread out because no one bothers to rummage through large bins of uni-priced clothing except for the rare cheapskate shopper with too much free time who’s looking for ridiculously undervalued clothes like that cute outfit Abbie wore a couple days ago that I found in some bin. I picked up 900 price tags, and spent a couple weeks individually pricing every item in the two-dozen shopping bags littering our basement. My philosophy was to price everything at the highest amount I’d be willing to pay, operating under the assumption that if a skinflint like me would buy it, a normal person would find it an irresistible deal.
By the morning of the sale, I had priced four bags. They were mostly clothes that the kids had just outgrown and I hadn’t stored yet, so I didn’t really clear any space in the basement with my efforts, but I didn’t clutter it up anymore either. I took what I had priced to the sale, and hoped for the best.
Unfortunately, Des Moines experienced its first rain in two weeks on the morning of our garage sale. That, combined with the near-record low high temperatures** that morning kept most shoppers away. I took the clothes that didn’t sell back to my basement and left the larger items for charity to take away, though I don’t know how charitable it is to stick someone with that old highchair. I ended up selling $3.50 worth of stuff, which isn’t much, but it did cover the cost of almost two-thirds of my price tags.
* A “good percentage” is defined as “more than Ellie would like to admit.”
** That makes sense, right?
My sudden call to action was spurred on by our neighborhood garage sale. A few of our neighbors are moving and wanted to minimize the number of boxes they have to pack, move, and store in their new home basement until their kids are old enough to clean out the basement as punishment.
Our basement is fast approaching the tipping point of containing too much crud to navigate, and I’d like to sell some of it. But I can’t sell my old video game systems that may or may not work anymore because they hold too many happy childhood memories, where “childhood” is defined as “the time in my life up to about two years ago.” The same excuse applies to my comic books. Those old college textbooks I should save in case I ever need to look up something about using Excel 5. That leaves old baby stuff as the only things I can sell.
We’re comfortable selling old baby items because we’re done having children, as in “snip, snip, tie, tie” done. Unless God has a sense of humor about this things, which (s)he probably does. We can sell the bouncy seats since the boys now have too much mobility to stay in them. We can sell a rocking chair since it was just a fantasy all along that we could sit and rock a baby without the other baby screaming or the toddler climbing into our laps. We can sell that awful high chair that I bought cheap at a rummage sale under the assumption that any high chair will work. Most of all, we can sell clothes.
The old baby clothes have overtaken one corner of our basement. We have six sizes worth of old girl’s clothes (seven sizes if you count 2T and 24-months as separate sizes even though they’re really not), and two sizes worth of old boy’s clothes, unisex clothes, and girl’s clothes that I just think can be unisex. We also have old preemie and newborn size clothes, but I doubt those would sell at a garage sale; no one really buys super-small clothes ahead of time in expectation of a preemie, and anyone with a baby that small probably isn’t rummaging anyway.
My job was to price the clothes. Ellie suggested dumping everything into bins with one price, but I know that clothes have to be spread out because no one bothers to rummage through large bins of uni-priced clothing except for the rare cheapskate shopper with too much free time who’s looking for ridiculously undervalued clothes like that cute outfit Abbie wore a couple days ago that I found in some bin. I picked up 900 price tags, and spent a couple weeks individually pricing every item in the two-dozen shopping bags littering our basement. My philosophy was to price everything at the highest amount I’d be willing to pay, operating under the assumption that if a skinflint like me would buy it, a normal person would find it an irresistible deal.
By the morning of the sale, I had priced four bags. They were mostly clothes that the kids had just outgrown and I hadn’t stored yet, so I didn’t really clear any space in the basement with my efforts, but I didn’t clutter it up anymore either. I took what I had priced to the sale, and hoped for the best.
Unfortunately, Des Moines experienced its first rain in two weeks on the morning of our garage sale. That, combined with the near-record low high temperatures** that morning kept most shoppers away. I took the clothes that didn’t sell back to my basement and left the larger items for charity to take away, though I don’t know how charitable it is to stick someone with that old highchair. I ended up selling $3.50 worth of stuff, which isn’t much, but it did cover the cost of almost two-thirds of my price tags.
* A “good percentage” is defined as “more than Ellie would like to admit.”
** That makes sense, right?
posted by Matt at
11:17 PM
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