Chapter 1
YARD SALES
Yard sales are probably one of my favorite places to go on a Saturday morning. The concept of yard sales has been around for years under
many different names such as rummage sales, rag sales and tag sales along with the old standard, garage sale. The American people have
always been rich in material goods and through the years with family possessions changing hands as family members die off the amount of
items in one household has become overwhelming. This alone with good economic conditions over the last fifty years and the introduction
of the large discount stores such as Kmarts and walmarts the yard sales have become a mecca of good used items in both usable items and
antiques and collectibles.
It seems as if the American family will go to Walmarts on Sunday and the next Saturday have to have a yard sale to get rid of the overflow.
The yard sale has also been a great way to retrieve some of the money they have spend even if it is only pennies on the dollar, this is
what attracts me to the yard sales as the overflow is usually the older itemsnot used anymore.
This format of looking for collectibles and antiques take quite a bit of planning if you are to be successful you simply don’t get out of bed
on Saturday Morning and hit the road at ten o’clock and find loads of items to sell. By 10:00 the really good stuff has been bought. I do
more planning in preparing for a Saturday morning yardsale hunt than I do any other format. The first and most important thing to do is
to know where you are going.
I have a procedure I follow every Friday night if I am going out the next day, First I will have the local paper, my map of the county, and
my Microsoft map program. The local newspaper is always full of yard sale advertisements and usually there will be a brief description of
the items for sale accompanying the location of the yard sale. I study the paper, marking on my map the yard sales that have potential
and then I will set up my route. I will try to incorporate into the route a urban area and a rural area. I usually accomplish this by
starting in one small town and mapping a route to another small town therefore I have both rural and urban yard sales to work. Why do
this? There are usually more older items in the rural yard sales, in rural I am referring to areas relating to farming country settings.
The Microsoft mapping program has been a god sent to me as the local maps available are not really that good and I can actually map out
my route and print it out. Searching and reading maps is not something I want to be doing on a Saturday morning when I should be working a yard sale and one good
way to ruin a Saturday with the wife is take on the task of reading maps in a car.
There are several more details that need to be taken care of on Friday if you are going yard selling on Saturday. Working yard sales
is time consuming and if you are really interested in finding items you can either resale or keep you need to learn discipline and have
a plan of attack. This sounds like I am trying to take all the fun out of the exercise and in some cases with my wife and I am sure with
most women to plan out a fast day of yard selling is taking all the fun out of it, but the excitement of finding a rare item or something
I can buy for pennies and sell for dollars is a lot of fun..
Make sure your wife or husband knows what you will be doing and if she or he is willing to abide by the rules of the day then company is
great and a super way to spend time with your spouse. I spend 6 days a week with my wife and I have taken Saturday in the summers to be
the one day I will not compromise on. She understands she can accompany me or she can plan her own day. I enjoy her company but not if
she tries to control what I am doing by spending time looking at junk and clothes then the day is lost. My Saturdays are fast paced and
concentrated so in most cases she usually decides to find something else to do on Saturdays.
I want to spend my time searching yard sales and not buying gas for the car, trying to find yard sales and stopping at retail stores to
shop or find I have run out of money and have to head for a ATM machine before the morning really gets started. After a few years I
finally realized I have to work up some sort of plan or find some way to put everything in order before I left the house on Saturday
morning.
Over time I have put everything in order starting with the route planning then I moved on to making sure the car was gassed up the night
before and the trunk and back seat was cleaned of all junk. Before the banks close on Friday evening I will go the bank and get at
least twenty one dollar bills, four five dollar bills and one ten dollar bill and most important at least five dollars in quarters.
I don’t know where you will be hunting but the places I search have a lot of items for a quarter and it is not only time wasted to
pull out a ten dollar bill to purchase a 25 cent item it is annoying to the person having the yard sale. Especially if it is early
in the morning before the person has built up their cash reserves.
Most yard sales will start in rural areas very early and in cities or urban areas not before 8 or nine o’clock. I always plan my day out
relating to the area I will be searching. If I am searching rural areas I will be ready to go by 7 O’clock in the morning with
a Mac Donald’s breakfast and plenty of fresh coffee. The early yard sales will in most cases not have everything unpacked by the
time I arrive but if you make a fast run through the yard sale you can usually tell if there will be there anything to wait for.
Yard sales have to be looked at with the thought in mind that I am looking for certain items and I need to know where I am likely
to find those items. Since I am certainly looking for older items then I will not spend most of my time looking in a new sub-division
where there will be only new couples just starting new
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