imple Vegetarian | Saling, saling

This weekend is the as soon as a yr city-huge outdoor sale in Highland Park. The everyday rate for a backyard sale allow is waived, and a local Realtor permits to publicize the occasion, presenting signs and maps displaying wherein earnings may be observed. It's one in each of my favored events, since it concentrates this kind of large variety of outside income in a especially small space that you're nearly confident to discover some element of hobby. Admittedly, we've got never been able to reproduction the haul we added domestic four years inside the past, whilst we would simply moved into this house and we loaded up on tools, which encompass a push mower, a circular saw, and 2 pruning shears. But we can continuously manipulate to discover as a minimum a book or a chunk of writing of clothing, it's greater than we commonly come away with from a randomly encountered sale.

This 12 months, we did no longer do too badly. We set out Saturday morning proper after breakfast, and we managed to discover a new guitar case for me (to replace the vintage one that succumbed to mold), multiple carpet samples that we're able to use as had to refurbish our home made cat scratching put up, a ebook, a puzzle, and a few random gives for nephews and nieces in advance than starvation, sore feet, and an sudden squall of rain sent us home again. We also had sufficient opportunity to see many outside sales, and to check the difference between an extremely good sale and a awful one. Here's a short listing of general policies I've offer you with for strolling a first rate, consumer-pleasant backyard sale. (Of the severa income we noticed the day prior to this, nearly none had determined all of them.)

1. Arrange items so people can see them. If you have clothes, either hang them up or lay them out side by side on a table, not in a huge pile. If you have books, put them on shelves, or arrange them in boxes with their spines facing up so people can read the titles. If shoppers have to rummage through boxes just to see what's available, most of them won't find it worth the effort.
2. Group like items together—all clothes on one table, kitchen items on another, tools on a third. Some of the sales we encountered seemed to be nothing but boxes of randomly grouped items, perhaps just hauled down from the attic that morning.
3. Give people room to move around. Some sales we visited looped round from the front yard to the back, up a driveway or a narrow walkway lined with tables so that there was barely room for one person to stop and look, let alone for others to pass by.
4. Put prices on items. This was the rule most frequently ignored at yesterday's sales. I think we only saw one sale that actually had every item priced. It was a real nuisance having to ask the price of any item we had an interest in—assuming we could find someone to ask. Which brings me to the fifth and most obvious rule:
5. Have someone there at all times who is obviously in charge. If buyers can't find anyone to take their money or answer their questions, they'll walk away empty-handed (or perhaps even walk away with stuff they haven't paid for).

As a side note, another interesting lesson we learned from our morning of yard-saling was that if you walk around carrying a guitar case, even if there's no guitar in it, people are a lot more likely to strike up a conversation with you. Before we bought the case, we mingled among the other shoppers more or less unnoticed; afterwards, when Brian was carrying the guitar case around with some of our smaller purchases in it, someone at nearly every sale we visited called out, "Hey, where'd you get the guitar?"