Selling Crap

Last weekend was city-wide garage sale day. This is one of the best ideas I've ever seen come from a Chamber of Commerce: you can have your own garage sale any old time, but two Saturdays a year you get every junkyard dog and compulsive dickerer in a 100 mile radius passing by.

This is a big improvement over the traditional garage sale, where you put up signs people ignore, then spend the whole day selling nothing, the whole traffic flow being neighbors who wanted to see what you'd been hiding.

I've never participated before, partly because I'm such a ridiculous packrat.

But a few years ago I saved up overtime to buy a digital piano and signed Em up for piano lessons. It's a nice one, touch-sensitive, weighted keys, the full complement of pedals, fewer voices than most keyboards but the ones it has are more realistic than average. Basically, it trumps an upright in being easier to move and you don't have to have it tuned. At the time, I paid around $1400 on sale at Mars, some traditional music stores had similar offerings priced closer to $2000.

I've been torn about bringing it upstairs. Mo loves to tink atonally, but she also likes to put apple slices in VCRs. I feel moderately better having a $1400 dust collector than having a $1400 piece of abstract food art.

Plus, there's the bath you take selling a used instrument. I've never sold even a cheap guitar I didn't eventually wish I'd kept. And the only logical way to sell the piano is on eBay. Except when I bought the piano, I was so convinced Em would be taking lessons through high school: 'We won't be needing these boxes!'

But when I was saving for this thing, if I'd found a practically new unit for half what even an aggressive discounter like Mars charges, I'd have snatched it. So I put the thing out for the city wide garage sale, which is basically the next best thing to eBay.

A couple of people sniffed around it, and the ones who knew what it was didn't think $800 was out of line. But if you're not in the market for such an instrument, it's an $800 dust collector, marked down from $1400.

So I brought out a bunch of other stuff to make my piano look like it was part of a garage sale. Well, a driveway sale: my garage is gross even as garages go.

Em brought out a few things from her room. Mostly stuff that wasn't worth selling, she's her Father's daughter on the packrat front. I had to convince her that skates she's outgrown to where she has to fold her toes under to jam them on was a good item to sell.

Mom came down to help, and when we went to pricing stuff she'd ask me, 'how much do you want for this?' and I didn't have an answer. But 'free to a good home' isn't much of a fund raiser, so I guessed at what a 'fair' price for a broken, scared, written-on table that was a bargain at Target a few years ago should be. I forgot about those compulsive dickerers.

Dog cage, hasn't been used since we had Brooklyn, cost about $90 new, but the pad and tray are ruined and long gone. It's a little bent up. $10, I thought, would be fair.

We hadn't had as many customers as Em had hoped, just a lady who paid her 50¢ for a recipe box Em had actually marked as 15¢ out of pity for the waif selling impossibly junked toys. A guy comes along and parks his car in the middle of the street (by park I mean he stopped and got out, leaving his door open and making it impossible for anyone to get by), and came trotting over to the dog cage. Checked the door to make sure it worked, and went back to conference with his frau.

'I want the dog cage,' he calls to me. 'In case someone pulls up. I've seen it happen.'

Okay, a motivated buyer. I only still had the thing because I hadn't dragged it out to the curb for the trash man.

Then he wants to dicker. I let it go for $8, feeling kind of sorry for a guy who will block traffic for something like that. Then, after he left, I realized my mistake: if I'd marked it at $20, he'd have talked me down to $15. I'd have made twice as much and he'd feel he got an even better bargain.

No kidding, my next door neighbor had two bags of golf clubs someone had given her in hopes they could be rid of them. She had nothing in these things, put $10 on them. Two people talked her down to $7 thinking it was per club, and after she'd already made $14 off individual sticks a guy dickered his way to $25 for both bags of leftovers, even though they were originally priced at a total of $20!

People is dumb.

Anyway, two people asked about my truck. I hadn't put a for sale sign on it. All I did was pile some brush I couldn't fit in my trashcans in it. The second guy to ask about it, though, was serious.

I like having a truck. Very handy when I (rarely) realize I need to take stuff to the dump, or (even less often) buy some furniture or a stove. But, always wanted one, and the price was right, I got it as a gift. It was my daily driver for about six years, and my main expense was a rebuilt transmission.

The down side is it's a single cab, and me and the honyocks take up enough of it there isn't room for Mug. I rationalized that it was handy when I needed to haul shit, but since I got another gift horse (an ’88 Buick even longer in the tooth, but with enough room for a family), I only drive the truck about once a month. It’s good to have a backup when you’re driving a car that is almost old enough to drink, but I have a 2-1/2 mile commute, and my insurance is coming due.

So this guy offers me $300 for the truck. I know, a pickup that runs is worth $1000, that’s the redneck gold standard, but with five years of absurdly low interest rates, Billy Bob can do better than a ’95 F-150 with 170,000 miles, a busted radio, a bumper used to take an impression of a Lincoln Mark IV...

Well, he can if Billy Bob is willing to have a payment, something I’ve resisted for years.

Plus, a couple of cars I’ve decommissioned over the years have sat in front of my house with ‘for sale’ signs for upwards of a year. One I sold for $40. So do I want this truck sitting around until I just feel luck the kidney guys will take it for free? Plus, I cut my car insurance bill almost in half by dropping it.

Anyone want a piano?