J. TODD FOSTER: Yard Sales: How Cheap And Tacky Can We Go?

Everyone should try this at least once, if for no other reason than to bite off a real slice of Americana pie. I am now among the initiated: I have participated in a yard sale as a seller.

First I had to get past the names “yard sale” and “garage sale.” I wasn’t selling my yard or my garage, but I suppose those names are better at stimulating commerce than “crap sale.”

(Like others before me, I still wonder why we park on driveways and drive on parkways, and why Exit 3 on Interstate 81 is actually at milepost 4.4. But as a priest once told me, some things are meant to remain mysteries.)

As yard sales go, this was an extravaganza, but in no way due to my meager contributions. This involved the whole neighborhood and was held Aug. 23, Race Day at Bristol Motor Speedway, on a 0.3-mile-long lane between Bristol and Abingdon.

The official start was 8 a.m., or so the signs and classified ad stated. “NO EARLY SALES,” the ad declared.

“You’ll have people standing in your driveway at 6 o’clock,” neighbor Greg warned me.

“Well, they’ll be standing there for two hours,” I vowed.

The day before the yard sale, outsiders cruised our dead-end street like robbers scoping out a getaway route for their next bank heist. These were yard sale warriors, asphalt retail aficionadoes getting a leg up on the competition.

I don’t know when the first car arrived the morning of the actual sale, but at 7 a.m. the missus summoned me from my slumber and ordered me to man my station – a foldable chair off to the side. I apparently could not be trusted to wear the apron holding enough coins to bankrupt a gumball machine and enough dollar bills to fill the garters of every strip club pole dancer in the Lower 48 (not that I have any idea of how many that would be).

By 7:13 a.m., we closed our first sale. A pair of my old discount-store work boots went for 75 cents. I turned to my 5-year-old son: “Well, that college fund of yours is off and running.”

By 7:30, my wife and I proved we were not very good at the yard-sale game when we sold an old but very operational refrigerator for $40. With icemaker. It had been marked $60, but we violated our agreed-upon protocol from the night before: no haggling.

The plan was that if buyers started to haggle, I would raise the price. “Yes, we can move off that price a little. Instead of a quarter, we’ll sell it to you for 30 cents,” I would say.

Several would-be buyers informed me, always with a smirk on their faces, that “you could have gotten 100, maybe 125, for that refrigerator” – the one sitting there with the “SOLD” sign affixed to the freezer door.

By 8 a.m., more than 100 vehicles lined our narrow country lane. They also lined a nearby thoroughfare with a few drivers honking horns and yelling at the slow pokes.

This was going to get ugly, I feared.

There was a crash two houses up the street. A little blue car had inched into a tiny spot with its rear hanging out on the road, like 10 pounds of potatoes packed in a 5-pound bag.

Another driver soon traded paint with the little blue car. IT’S BRISTOL, BABY! YARD SELLING THE WAY IT OUGHT TO BE!

Customers continued flocking to our roadside mercantile exchange. I was struck speechless when several aged, faded curtains left by the previous homeowner fetched two bucks.

It spoke truth to the sage words uttered by my father 10 years earlier. He and my mother were getting ready for a yard sale and had spread out hundreds of items on the garage floor.

“Dad, you know there’s no way some of this stuff is going to sell, don’t you?” I said.

Dad quickly reinforced his wisdom and succinctness, albeit not as eloquently as he usually did.

“You could put a price tag on a dried-turd-on-a-stick and it would sell,” he assured me.

“Really?” I asked. “Maybe we should call this a crap sale. Just what is the going rate for a dried-turd-on-a-stick?”

Dad shot me a look I had seen before, a look that said “you ask too many questions, newspaperman.”

Meanwhile, fast-forward to my own yard sale. Buyers ignored classy women’s clothing in favor of pit-stained men’s polo shirts dating back to the Reagan years.

“You’re giving this stuff away, aren’t you?” one woman said.

Maybe we should have priced these items at more than a quarter, or 50 cents for the premium stuff. But the college fund was growing, granted at community college tuition rates.

Perhaps my most valuable exchange came with a couple of ladies who didn’t buy anything but gave me a great recipe for fried green tomatoes. They also urged me to be cautious: “Had any lifters yet?”

one asked me. Apparently yard sale pros like to use their small children to walk away with sacks full of stuff they could have bought for a buck 75. Then they take the haul to the flea market and jack up the prices.

We closed our last sale at 2:21 p.m.

The neighborhood was deserted by then, but as we were packing up the Goodwill box, a woman drove into my driveway and onto my grass.

“I don’t want to block your driveway,” she said.

“Why?” I asked. “The yard sale is over.”

“Got any end-of-sale deals?” she inquired.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Is a quarter for a $20 shirt too rich for your blood?”

She bargained us down on a couple of shirts and then asked that we throw in a hair barrette, priced at a dime, for free. We did, just to be rid of her.

She drove back through the grass as I picked up a pair of bowling shoes that did not sell. At my bowling prime I went twice a year – when my golf game got rained out. But for some reason, I thought it prudent to buy my own pair of bowling shoes.

How much money must I have squandered over my adulthood? I asked myself. Then I spied a pair of golf shoes with the price tag still on the box. In 1986, I paid $85.99 for those shoes, which hurt my feet and went back into the box for 22 years.

In the end, we were left with nearly eight hours of mostly wasted time (minus days of prep time), $85.75 in gross revenues, $51.75 in net revenues (we spent $34 at a neighbor’s sale), an empty plastic foam coffee cup crammed into our mailbox, trampled grass, the knowledge that our neighbors have better stuff than us, and this column.

I also was left with this troubling question:

How did we ever win the Cold War?

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at jfoster@bristolnews.com or (276) 645-2513.