Discount Furniture here! Hello, Juneau! Did that get your attention?
You know what season it is? No, not road construction.
I’m talking about garage sale season. I love garage sales. I love getting up early on a Saturday, not buying anything for a couple hours and driving home before lunch proudly bearing a new pre-owned Sinead O’Connor CD and a broken lamp. I consider it soothing, if not truly cost-effective.
The garage sale, in its natural habitat, behaves somewhat like a mushroom. The season starts after the snowmelt and lasts till termination dust. They pop up, early in the morning, and only last a short while. And sometimes they smell weird.
Personally, I think they’re always fun. From the haphazard pricing scheme to the homemade, and sometimes misspelled, signs, they are the quintessence of an endearingly homespun economy. My absolutely favorite erroneous signs include Yale Sale, Garbage Sale, and Yard Sard. I can’t tell you how many times those have brought me to literal tears. Yard Sard … I need a moment.
However, when correctly spelled, you may see around town different signs like Garage Sale, Yard Sale, and Moving Sale. In case you’re confused, a Yard Sale is the same thing as a Garage Sale, because neither of them ever take place in a yard — that’s just silly. On the sunniest of days, they take place in a driveway.
But Moving Sales are the piece de resistance of Saturday-morning scouting trips. You can find all sorts of goodies — including the great holy grail of all garage sale variants: furniture. Everybody is out for the furniture. Good luck throwing elbows through the throngs of people trying to drag shelves and ottomans home from the moving sale. The hoards will be out, like sharks driving minivans, circling neighborhoods for discount davenports and low-cost lowboys.
But you rarely find too much furniture at a Juneau garage sale. If you’ve ever been garage sale-ing (by the way, is there another way to say that so I don’t sound like I just mounted a jib on a carport?) you know that there are some things you can always expect. For example, clothes. And not just any clothes, mostly kids clothes and relics of ‘80s and ‘90s fashion. Shoulder pads? We got ‘em. Denim cargo pants? Aplenty. You’ll also find sci-fi novels, vinyl records, cassette tapes, and CDs. Good for listening to on vintage equipment, weirding your kids out (“look, it’s 1/1,00,000,000th of Spotify, on a plate!”), and for using in your college report on the steady decline on Western civilization (“And that’s when we invented MTV”). There’s also plenty at garage sales that truly are junk: random as-seen-on-TV products, as-seen-on-late-night-TV-ten-years-ago products, faded novelty cups, TV trays, the occasional unicorn desk sculpture and so on.
Don’t get me wrong, though. Look long enough and you’re bound to find some treasure. I once found an old ‘80s Yamaha keyboard at a garage sale on Douglas, it’s only almost two octaves, and it was probably the best $1.50 I’ve ever spent. It was the perfect size for backpacks or keeping in the car. It just goes to show there are always some gems out there. Then I lent it to my brother … if you’re reading this, Solomon, I want my keyboard back!
So that’s my guide to going to garage sales. Five other rules you should know about: 1. Wake up early. Six a.m. is a great time to get your coffee and start out in your car. 2. Go for clusters. Try to catch streets with multiple sales. 3. Bring more cash than you think you need. 4. It’s a Garage Sale. Don’t haggle. 5. Buy the lumpia, lemonade, and the fry bread. Trust me.
But what if, you’re saying to yourself, can’t I host a garage sale myself? Well look no further, because I myself have hosted a garage sale, and it was an appalling failure, so I feel quite qualified to tell you all about what not to do.
So, first of all, my then-girlfriend and I had been planning this all winter. We’d been collecting old clothes (of course), and, although we had no furniture to sell, boxes upon boxes of forgettable items. We picked a high-traffic date with good weather forecasting. We used acrylic paints, expensive poster board, and string to create the most eye-catching signs, strategically placed on street corners, and we even rigged up a tarp system in between our cars to create the ultimate comfortable and inviting garage sale experience. For that whole short night of midnight sun, we shuffled around in sleeping bags in restless anticipation of our inevitable and lucrative success.
Well, morning came, and although we were bright eyed with the sun by 6 a.m., it wasn’t until 10 that a single car passed by and politely glanced at our storefront. Half an hour later we got our first true customer. “Good morning!” we said. “Do you have any furniture?” they said. They bought a small art kit for $4 and left. Sadly they would be our only paying customer that day, leaving us with a couple truckloads of disowned trophies of our failed business venture to take to various charities around town, all the while wondering “where did we go wrong?”
Well, at some point we went to reclaim our announcement signs, only to be confronted by something that didn’t look like a yard sale sign at all but a neon blob of sunken poster board and running paint that read: “GABFQE SALF.” And the address was nothing but a soupy unification of all letters at once. Well at least we didn’t write Yard Sard.
So if I could give any cautionary advice about hosting your own garage sale in Juneau, it would be the following: 1. make waterproof, legible signs. Don’t go getting fancy with it. 2. If you’re in a cul de sac or other dead end, consider doing a community sale with your neighbors. Without being in a thoroughfare, you may not be big enough on your own to attract the customer flow you’re looking for. 3. Most of all, make sure you have some furniture!
• Guy About Town appears twice a month and includes seasonal musings on what changes and what doesn’t in a small town. Guy can be reached at unzicker.music@gmail.com.
