City Wide Garage Sale '08

I didn't put out a garage sale today. That might not seem like the lead for a story, but this is the first Saturday in May and Gardner.

If you live anywhere in the vicinity (I've met people who drove from over two hours away for this) and have any appetite at all for bargain hunting, there's no other place to be the first Saturday in May. Used to be also the first Saturday in October, but the problem with doing something too often is people decide to wait for the next one.



It was the brainchild of the Chamber of Commerce. Gardner is growing and thriving, but it's still a small town at heart. When we moved her a decade ago, it was a small town becoming a bedroom community. Seven thousand people as I recall, which was almost 10,000 by the Y2K census, and last I heard it's fast closing on 20,000.



We're also the seat of the Johnson County Fair, and that's where this garage sale mayhem comes from, sort of.



Any micropolis would naturally be overcome with sweat to be the site of it's county fair. In fact, I bet most towns this size would be more than willing to host the county fair of another county if someone wanted a place to hold one. It's not a Super Bowl or a NASCAR race, but it's economic activity, and plenty of it.



But the local restaurants, for instance, benefited little from the fair because everyone coming for that spends their money on midway onion blossoms and buffalo burgers.



The City Wide Garage Sale turned out to be the answer. You can find five consecutive houses without a garage sale, but you'll have to hunt. Literally hundreds of garage sales, so close together you can often park once and hit three or four sales on foot easier than you could move your car to the next one.

It's great because the people holding the sales get probably twenty times the traffic a garage sale normally attracts, so they move more of their useless junk. The consumers get a year's worth of sales concentrated into a single day. And they have to eat something, at some point, so the local restaurants (and Gardner boasts some fine Mom & Pop eateries worth of a full documentary by Guy Fieri.



If you ever come to Gardner, either for a garage sale or for our excellent tracts of identical custom houses, check out The Downtowner, Blazers, The Gardner Cafe, Bob and Dee's....

Em had been on a sleepover for her BFF's birthday and got a jump on the garage sale action before me and Mo picked her up. She did well, too, getting a monster Crayola bank and a giant M&M.



I didn't do quite as well. I couldn't afford the Spyder Bykes pedal car ($75 and needs work, plus I didn't have a good way to get it home). I looked at a half dozen sales for jeans Mo can wear. She's growing so fast, I'm already looking for the size after what she wears. I failed, but found a couple of pairs of nice Levi's that I'm pretty sure Em can wear. I also got Mo a little rubber frog she seemed attached to and a couple other stuffed guys to add to her bed.