Bargain Hunting: 2024’s Best Cities for Scouring Garage Sales

What are your best 3 tips for organizing a yard sale?

• Promote using both old-school marketing (word of mouth, yard signs) and social media (especially Facebook Marketplace).
• Consider the layout of items in the yard sale. How will you arrange them throughout the yard?
  • The anchoring effect can work for you – people place a high value on the first piece of information that they encounter. If you only place cheap items at the front of the yard, then customers will assume that there is only junk at the sale. If you only place expensive products at the front, customers may be dissuaded by the high prices and leave without purchasing.
  • Split items up and set up tables and sections with signs to help customers find what they are looking for (“collectables,” “electronics,” “furniture,” “deals!”). Successful retailers use these techniques, you should too!

• Have a strategy for bargaining and selling. How much are you willing to lower your price when asked? How will you engage with customers during the sale? A positive attitude and smile can help set the mood as they enter your yard sale.
  • Make it inviting by coming out to greet customers and allow them to ask questions as you guide them through the yard (rather than sitting behind a table and staring at them).
  • Providing refreshments and snacks will encourage them to stay longer and to purchase something to offset the free snacks, also known as reciprocity (from Robert Cialdini’s principles of influence).

What’s your best advice for establishing prices for a yard sale?

• Visit other yard sales to benchmark pricing. You can also visit yard sales on different days to see what days of the week are especially busy and which are slow.
• Visit resale websites, like Facebook Marketplace and eBay to get an idea for price ranges. One thing to note is that people tend to place a greater value on items they own, referred to as the endowment effect. This is especially true of clothing – how much would you really pay for someone’s used t-shirt?
• If possible, accept both cash and mobile payment options. Customers may not carry cash and will also be willing to pay more if they don’t have to part with physical money.
• Consider lowering prices on the last day of the sale if you are looking to sell all merchandise. If you don’t end up selling much merchandise, review both your promotion and pricing strategies. Did nobody show up, indicating bad promotional efforts, or did people show up but not buy, which could be due to a mistake in pricing or not having enough products that people want.

What are the most popular resale items in recent years?

While I don’t have any specific answer to this question, certain items like exercise equipment, electronics, and collectible items have more value than clothes or items that may only have personal significance. Visiting other sales and online marketplaces may give you an idea of valuable items that you may have.

What are three benefits and three downsides of joining a neighborhood or city-wide yard sale?

Pros:

1. The potential for increased promotion and customers.

2. More items overall means that customers are more likely to stay longer (and buy more).

3. Save energy (don’t have to be there the whole time maintaining a positive attitude).

Cons:

1. Will have to share profits and costs.

2. You sell your items better than someone else. If you’re not there or working with other customers, someone else may be selling your items…or not!

3. Your items may be competing with other sellers’ items in real time.

What are your best tips for shopping at a yard sale?

• Before you go, establish a budget that you’re willing to spend and do some research on what other places would charge for used items (e.g., Goodwill, St. Vincent DePaul, eBay, other yard sales). If you do go online to comparison shop, be careful to avoid offending the yard sale host. If the price of an item is cheaper somewhere else, you may bring that up but be nice! A seller’s counter to your lower price request would be that you can have the item now rather than waiting for delivery. Take that into consideration as you negotiate.
• The more you buy, the more you can potentially save! Rather than haggling over the price of one item, select a few items and negotiate a lower price for purchasing multiple items.
• Have multiple payment options — both cash and mobile payments — ready before you go. Some sellers may prefer cash. If you see an item that you like but have to go to an ATM to get more money, you should have some cash available to ask the sellers to “hold” the item for you.
• Estate sale or yard sale? Both are selling the same things: used items. But it’s all in the difference in terms. People expect to pay more for an item at an estate sale versus a yard sale versus a rummage sale. You might find expensive furniture at the estate sale, an exercise bike at a yard sale, and perhaps clothes you can turn into cleaning rags at a rummage sale. This is the concept of framing, where terms like “estate” have more positive attributes than “rummage”, which would lead customers to think that the products at an estate sales are more expensive and valuable than those at a yard or rummage sale.