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| Not the most professional signage, but it was a beautiful morning. |
Today I'm driving over to Nashville to visit my brother. He's been diagnosed as a schizophrenic unable to live outside of a care facility so he's been living in an institutionalized setting for over thirty years. It's been a few years since I've seen him. I would always visit him when he was staying in Knoxville, but since they closed the state mental hospital there he's been moving around to various group homes. He's been in a care center in Nashville for the past couple of years or so.
I've been wanting to visit my brother for some time, but I've just not been able to make it over there in the short visits I make to Tennessee. This year with my wife visiting in Houston and flying up to meet me, it was more economical to fly from there to Nashville and it afforded me an ideal opportunity to visit my brother. Too bad that he is so inconveniently located for me, but that's the way it is and not much I can do to change that.
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| Maybe a sale in the basement is not the best for drawing customers, but it was cool inside on a hot July Saturday. |
In my previous post I mentioned how I was organizing a yard sale at my mother's house in order to clear out some of the accumulation of unneeded things. The sale was a bust. We had about 12 visits with a total sales of $11.50. It was basically an experiment for me and a clean-up mission. I think I took a pretty effective marketing approach with listings on various internet sites, but there was not much signage. This lack of signs might not have mattered too much since there didn't seem to be much traffic in the neighborhood. And we seemed to have a lot of competition in the area. One visitor said he had 23 sales to go to that day and mine was number 14. Looking at the yard sale location maps on a couple of web sites confirmed that there were indeed a ton of sales going on that day.
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| A pool table served to display some of the goods. What a jumble! |
There were other factors which I realized would probably keep visitors down and my fears were confirmed by the outcome of the sale that day. No worry though. My brother's family and my sisters are planning a much larger sale in the fall and I helped get part of the merchandise organised for them. They'll have a bigger draw since they will be adding tools, furniture, and baby items to the inventory. Those things always seem to attract more potential customers.
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| There was some pretty weird and obsolete stuff in our sale. |
I've never been one to hold big yard sales or shop at them for that matter. I've probably visited not more than 8 yard sales in my life and bought very little except for one time in Richmond, Virginia when I was buying furniture to put into a decrepit apartment my girlfriend at the time and I were moving into. I'm the kind of person who generally prefers to buy everything new. Yard sales and thrift shops are typically not my thing.
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| Had a lot of books on sale. I think I'll be taking some of them back home to read. |
Yard sales? I could certainly stand to do another one at my own home. So much stuff to get rid of and I hate to give it all away or throw it out. That's probably what I'll end up doing, but it's kind of fun to think about having a yard sale. It's usually less fun to actually do one.
Have you ever done a yard sale? Do you ever shop at yard sales? How do you prefer to get rid of the stuff you no longer need?
