Dust Off Your Yard-Sale Skills
After hitting half a dozen Saturday morning yard sales in rapid succession, things start to get blurry.
Was that plastic plug-in Santa light over at the place on 25th or was that up on 38th? Was the Billy Beer can for $1 being sold at the North Side house that had the Grand Funk Railroad eight-track? And what about that Gonzaga University School of Law T-shirt going for a quarter?
But other memories remain clear.
Though the yard-sale season is just warming up, many weekend bargain hunters employed what appeared to be well-established shopping styles.
In not much more than the time it takes to ask “Who would buy this stuff?” some people got out of their cars, surveyed the used sweaters, jigsaw puzzles, golf clubs and toasters and began to gather up selections. Others looked and looked and went away empty-handed.
At one South Hill sale, where prices were marked on everything, people kept approaching two women on the porch, holding up shot glasses or ski boots, asking “How much is this?”
At another sale, a foursome of older women with hair colors not found in nature pronounced item after item “darling.”
At still another, a mother made the unbelievable decision to let her son buy one of those “Hey, baby, I’ll be back to pick you up later” portable microphones. Perhaps she had been assured it was broken.
And at virtually every sale, people were trying to sell metal ice trays that looked like they came from June Cleaver’s kitchen.
Yard sales aren’t about supply and demand, of course. You see that right away. After all, how much demand is there for broken vacuum cleaners, old algebra texts and stained stuffed animals?
No, yard sales are about “Who knows?”
Who knows what somebody might actually buy? And who knows when you’ll stumble onto a nifty little quilted jacket for 75 cents or a perfect-condition Benny Goodman album for a dime?
It’s subjective stuff. Just because I don’t have any use for a “Life” board game or a February 1968 issue of National Geographic doesn’t mean you wouldn’t enjoy it.
Some shoppers smiled as if they believed the weekend would last forever. Others looked as if they had been dragged along at gunpoint.
In the background, wherever you went, you got to hear the barking, engine-starting and calling across the fence of American neighborhoods on a Saturday morning. That alone ought to be worth something.
, DataTimes MEMO: Being There is a weekly feature that looks at gatherings in the Inland Northwest.