Living better, spending less.
Yard sale results
7Sep2009 Filed under: Life Author: KishaI had my stockpile yard sale this weekend, which is possibly the last one of the season. It went really well, and we made $1,425 in two days. My base goal was to break a thousand, so I am thrilled that we brought in as much as we did. It was so much fun!
On Friday morning, my dad and husband were out at six in the morning, trying to get the tables set up, when it started raining. It was extremely hard to get everything organized while people were arriving, and we got a really late start as a result. But the rain went away and we had pretty weather for the rest of the time. However, I didn’t get out until after lunch to take "before" pictures of the sale, so these are after quite a few sales have already taken place.
And just for fun, a "during" photo. Here’s Evelyn, clearly trying to do the math on someone’s purchases. "Okay, you have two shampoos and a toothbrush… that’ll be four dollars, please!"
And this is just before we started boxing things back up.
We packed everything that’s left into just a handful of boxes, and will be bringing them home for the winter. To put that into perspective, the stock that we had from the last sale was already in the garage at my parents, and we sent a total of three car loads packed full I’ll have lots of fun unpacking them into my storage room, I’m sure. Between the yard sales, I do sell some stuff to other people, like at my husband’s job, and to family, so it’s worth it to me to unpack everything and repack it in the spring. We are still debating on whether or not to have one more sale here at our house before the season is completely gone. It will depend partly on whether or not we get everything home in time, of course. We had the car so full with other stuff that we only brought a couple boxes home with us last night.
2 Responses to “Yard sale results”
Leave a reply
About this blog
When I became a stay-at-home-mom, I promised I could save our family money by shopping sales and maybe even using a few coupons. I had no idea what I was getting into. These days, I am on a first-name basis with the cashiers at the local drugstores, I haven't paid for toothpaste or shampoo in over a year and I spend my free time here, helping others do the same. So please, make yourself at home while you learn how to save, and when to spend!
Helloheather
September 7th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
Hey, how do your advertise your stockpile sales? Do you have to do much describing of what exactly you’re selling and yes, you’re really selling it for such and such prices? Do people ever give you a hard time, or think you’re up to something shady?
Kisha
September 7th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
This one, we put an ad in the newspaper, an ad on craigslist (which i’m pretty sure was a waste of time for this area) and a few flyers around town, plus word of mouth. People were calling their friends and telling them they should come (which is always nice.) My dad puts up good signs, both at the road and up the road, which is how most of the traffic comes. They live on a fairly major road, for the town they live in, and they also have a history of good yard sales, so that is really how we pull traffic in most of the time (and also one of many reasons we like to have the sales there. Other reasons include free babysitting, a giant yard, the company, free babysitting, yummy food, free babysitting and combining our stuff with theirs for a larger sale.) If I hadn’t felt so pressed for time, I would have listed some basic prices on my craigslist post and especially on the printed flyers, but basically all I said was that in addition to the regular yard sale stuff (tools, clothes, etc) we had brand new, name brand items at 30-80% off retail prices and listed a few categories of products. No clue if anyone even saw those ads and made the effort to drive over or not.
It’s interesting, but in the first two sales, only about two people even asked me where the stuff came from. I was prepared for many more. This weekend, I probably got asked fifty times if we had bought out a store or what. It may have been because I had more stuff this time than ever before? I don’t know. Every sale is different. No one gave me a hard time about it, although I have heard of it happening. I’ve heard of people getting harassed by the police because someone informs them of a yard sale with “stolen” merchandise. One of the recommendations was to have your receipts with you. I didn’t because it just seemed so unlikely. The first sale I did, I explained to the first few customers that everything was brand new, but then I realized that no one really was even questioning that. I think the fact that I have SO MUCH in the way of new products reassured people that there was nothing shady going on.