Saturday, April 21, 2012

Yardale Mayham

Today we participated in the Spring Hyattsville City Yard sale. In the city I live in you normally have to purchase a permit to hold a yard sale. It costs 8 bucks. Two times out of the year they organize a city wide yard sale. One in the Spring and one in the Fall. On this day you can sell without a permit. They even allow you to register so you can be mapped and added to a list of participating homes.


I had been looking forward to this day for a while. I've been trying to sell off some of my collectibles. They had overflowed into my basement. Once upon a time I had attempted to sell them online. There was no interest in the items. I had even inventoried and priced some items so my wife could try to sell them on EBay. This was our opportunity to sell some things. We even had some old nick knacks and clothes that needed to be eliminated from our closets.

My mother gave us some things to sell, just as long as the money made from those items went to our daughter. My wife's aunt brought over sacks full of clothes and some shoes and purses. For the last 2 nights we organized and priced all of our items. We priced everything from clothes, toys, and nick knacks to shoes, Cd's, and framed art. Pricing my collectibles was a bit more complicated. There was a big difference between what they  were worth, what I wanted for them, and what people would pay. I was reasonable and realistic when pricing those items.

We started setting up tables at 7am, and bringing everything out. We even setup a clothes line and rack to hang the clothes that was for sale. The yard sales weren't supposed to begin until 9am. Soon after we started setting up, all these creeps started coming out of the woodwork. Everyone was looking for jewelry and old gold. We had none of that, but when informing the creeps, they reacted as if we had a big sign in the yard advertising jewelry and old gold. One guy sped off as if we were wasting his time.

I knew that today would be difficult for me. Not only letting go of items, but dealing with stupid people. I have little tolerance for stupidity. My patience was tested when the deaf African guy showed up. He started picking up items and examining them. Everything was priced to sell. He took it upon himself to put all the items in a basket. He wanted to buy in bulk to send it back to Africa. It wasn't a thing about, if I would consider doing it, it was a thing that we had to do no matter what. We had about a half a dozen purses priced about 3 bucks a piece, he wanted to buy them all for 3 bucks. I had a weight set worth $75 bucks, he wanted it for $20. That's when I got pissed and told him to go to Target and get a weight set for $20. All the items in the basket he compiled, were to offer us $2 for the lot. He dumped everything and walked off. He had told my wife, he didn't want to offend us and would be back later. At this point was inside, because I was ready kick his ass.

After a rough start we started getting people that were actually interested in buying things and paying what we asked for. Some people did negotiate, but at a dollar difference and were granted their request. I sold some 80s baby toys for asking price. I sold a few Star Wars items in a bundle for 2 bucks off asking. I even sold all my die cast Star Wars, Terminator, and Alien vs Predator figures for good money. I sold some other toys and negotiated the sale on a weight set for tomorrow. I was surprised that I sold a good amount of my collectibles.

At about 2pm we started breaking down. Of course that's when people started showing up. Then a blue Volvo station wagon pulls up. It was the deaf African guy. He starts going through the boxes of items we were going to take to goodwill. I took one look at him and told him nothing was for sale. He then walks over to the bag of purses. Them my wife tells him again that nothing was for sale. He points at his ear when noticing our frustration. She makes a hand signal to inform him that the sale closed and he left. I would have rather burned the items then sold them to him after he riled me up in the morning. I have no problem with persons with disabilities or people looking for a good deal. The problem is that I'm not a wholesaler. I priced everything for what I would pay and this guy thinks were obligated to sell our stuff for pennies so he can resell it at full price overseas. Not me buddy. I don't play that shit.

I wanted to have a yard sale to sell some things, get to know the neighbors and spend the day with my family. I expected to get regular down to earth people looking for something cool to buy. Not a bunch of penny pincher's looking for broken necklaces and free stuff.

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