Oh, my goodness. Okay, so we woke up at about 6:00am and started putting things out and cleaning things off. By about 7:00am, we had a few early birds. You know, you specifically put in your ad, in bold type, "No early birds". But people don't listen. They think, "everyone except me". But that was the least of our problems.
One of our neighbors came to check out our stuff and introduce herself. She lives on the corner, and we talked about how this town is stupid because they won't allow you to put up signs to advertise your sale unless it's on your property. Then she left, and for two hours nothing happened. No one came. Finally, Dad and I decided to put a sign on a box and sit it on the corner of the road with two big rocks in it. As we walked to the corner, we saw a whole bunch of cars at our neighbor's house, and she had stuff in her driveway! She was having a garage sale, too, but she never put an ad in the paper. She was sponging off of our ad! People saw the name of our street in the ad, and when they got to the corner they'd go to her sale and never even see ours! That slimey bitch...
So, I took action. I gunned it to the party supply store to buy balloons and crap. If we didn't have the prime location, then we would compensate with flashy decorations. Fortunately, I know my audience. In a mostly conservative, Republican town, what colors would be the most effective? Red, white and blue! I bought a dozen balloons, bunting, flags and streamers and stuck them all over the front of our yard and our cars. Sure enough, the people started coming. And some of them actually bought stuff, too.
We just barely made a profit, but we decided to look at this as a "rehearsal" garage sale to get a feel for the area. Because if we look at it as an actual garage sale, it was pitiful. Besides the cheating, no-good, under-handed neighbors, Mom fell down in the hallway as she was trying to grab something from another room. She tripped on a chair and gave herself a beautiful black eye. I'm just happy I took out the sharp wooden storage box we had in the hallway from the spot before her head landed there. I think this made her realize that we need to get rid of most of this stuff-- it's not only depressing to have no space, it's dangerous. Besides that, I got sunburnt, and the cats crapped all over the living room to show us their disgust at being left alone while we were right outside for seven hours. So, yeah. Not the greatest sale, ever, by any means.
At least there's June...
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