Yard sale wisdom
My wife and I had a yard sale this past weekend. I really should say my wife had a yard sale, because I was just labor in this endeavor, she was management.
My wife, Vicky, spent the majority of the week going through our house gathering items for sale. The pile of items grew as the week progressed. She had shoes, cooking items, toys, knickknacks and a variety of other things. We even went to our old barn and pulled out some stuff that had not seen the light of day in at least five years.
But I have to say, our main inventory consisted of my 9-year-old daughter’s clothes. I was amazed at the amount of clothes Cadyn had accumulated in just nine short years. She had more clothes than I do and I have had 52 years to fill my closet.
Granted my wife is a very thrifty shopper and most of Cadyn’s clothes came from yard sales, gifts and clothes that were on sale, but still, this child had a lot of clothes.
Vicky then proceeded to price each and every item. She was very meticulous in her process and each item had to be priced exactly right. This is a type of arithmetic that is way over my head. I could not understand how one of Cadyn’s shirts would be priced at $1.50 and then another similar shirt would be priced at $2. When I asked how she arrived at the prices, because to me it didn’t make any sense, I was given an explanation that would have confused some of the leading economists in the country. It is a very complicated formula that takes into account the age of the item, the original purchase price, the season of the clothing, the maker of the item and the item’s popularity. I think the gross domestic product of Guam is also part of the calculations, but I’m not really sure.
My main contribution to the sale was my collection of movies on DVD. I haven’t watched them in a while, so I figured why not put them in the yard sale. When Vicky asked me what I would like to price them at, I said 50 cents each. Obviously, this didn’t fit into the formula for properly pricing items to put in a yard sale. My wife and her parents both told me that the correct price for a DVD in our yard sale was $2 each. I thought that was too high for a used DVD, so we compromised on $1 each.
After a lot of very hard work, by my wife, the big day arrived on Saturday. We had advertised in The Sentinel-Record (see how I got that plug in) that our yard sale would begin at 7 a.m. We started putting items out at 6 a.m. and our first customer arrived at 6:15. Our traffic was fairly steady and we sold some things. But I can’t say that we were really moving the merchandise. Around 9:30 a.m., I made the bold move to drop the price of the DVDs to 50 cents each. To be honest, I did consult with management before making this move. Well, I don’t like to brag, but after that, we had a surge of sells and ended up having a great yard sale. Still had a lot of Cadyn’s clothes left over and we will be donating those to places here in our community.
So after it was all said and done, I asked Vicky what were we going to do with the money we got from the yard sale. She says some of it is going to pay for some dance classes for Cadyn. I say OK, what about the rest? She says, “Oh I’m putting the rest back to use when I go shopping. Because Cadyn will be needing some winter clothes pretty soon.”
I know what you are thinking, but I have been married long enough to know, you never argue with management.