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June 12, 2005
Stoop Sale
Thanks to help from Dad, Mom, Derek and Nick, the stoop sale was a success. Dad did us a huge favor and drove in the minivan-full of dumpster rescues and junk from the attic. My brother Nick contributed board games, DVDs, baseball equipment, and Star Trek paraphernalia. That, along with a sizable collection of leftover items from my childhood and Mom and Dad's gadget-collecting past, meant we pretty much had something for everyone.
Derek swears that the same people showed up today that showed up at the last stoop sale we had a year and a half ago. They are probably eBay resellers and stoop sale regulars (they come in cars and know how to bargain). They come early and find the good stuff that's priced cheap, then they come later to clean up on the stuff we've marked down.
There are also the pointless hagglers -- they look over everything with disdain and bargain endlessly over 50 cents (they also criticize things loudly -- one woman said about a TV five times, "It's not even color, right?" when I had explained that it was color and worked fine). I had to pretend to be doing something else to avoid them, since they never seemed to actually want to buy anything.
Plenty of nice people from the neighborhood showed up and bought DVDs and toys and board games. That makes the whole thing a bit more pleasurable -- they're happy to find cheap used things, you're happy your junk didn't go to waste. Some kids actually got excited about stuffed animals and games we gave up on decades ago. Other people just have a weak spot for stuff -- one guy kept picking up things long after he said he was leaving.
Then there was the Ukrainian woman who spent at least an hour going over a set of china that we were selling for $5. She inspected every single piece, talking my ear off the entire time, and rejected anything with so much as a scratch. I kept explaining that it was used, hence the really cheap price tag for an 8 piece set with platters and whatnot. To pack it up she wasn't satisfied with any old bag or box, or even free luggage. Instead, she had me wrap everything up (okay, I'm a sucker) and put it in just the right box and wrap that up with string. When the string was too hard to hold on to, she got some free clothes to use for padding. Oh, and did I mention that she wanted to get me down to $2 for the good stuff she was taking???? I said $3. I really didn't give a damn but there was no way she was taking it for free with all the manual labour involved. Just when we thought we were finally rid of her, she came back, having only made it halfway to the corner. She asked if we had a cart she could use. So I gave her a crappy granny cart that's been sitting in our closet for ages. It's amazing how she pulled off the nice wacky grandmother act just enough to get me to be her personal slave for an hour.
One strange thing is that people are really suspicious of free stuff. Someone had left a wine rack in front of the building the day before. Since it was in the garbage area I moved it to the free pile but no one was interested. Later, Derek stuck a $6 price tag on it and someone bought it 20 minutes later.
The books didn't sell as well as last time (I ended up with an $18 credit when I took them to the used book store later), but the electronics went pretty fast -- TVs, games, stereos, speakers, etc. With all of the stuff and the initial chaos of people, I didn't do a great job of pricing or keeping track of things, but the main point was to distribute the stuff so it gets used again. Typewriters, the overhead projectors, speakers in need of TLC -- all of those found new homes. We both feel pretty good about having spent the day the way we did. I have a sunburn and am completely exhausted, and we still don't have a place to move to, but I turned half a dumpster's worth of stuff into a profitable recycling project, right?
The Chinese wedding we went to Saturday in Flushing was really interesting -- mainly for the 10 course meal of unusual food involved, and I will eventually post about the 10th year high school reunion, I promise -- I have to go to bed now, though, before I fall asleep on my desk.
Posted by csageday at June 12, 2005 11:52 PM