Would You Like a Bedroom Set To Go With Those Potholders?

This weekend we had our long awaited tag sale and I must say, our sale was a good one. We spent the whole weekend together, generated $650 in cash, and found good homes for many of our treasures.

Our family motto throughout the weekend was "don't be greedy," so we bargained with anyone who asked. In fact, we held a "bag sale" within our "tag sale" in the last hour that was a big hit with our customers: we handed shoppers a bag and charged them $5 for all they could fit into it.

As we prepared for and executed our sale, we learned a few things through trial and error that we thought might benefit Suburban Zen readers. Here's our top 10:

1. You don't have to do a lot of marketing, but do some. We posted our sale on Craig's List and put signs up in the neighborhood. That's all it took to generate a heavy flow of traffic for most of the day on Saturday.
2. Prepare as if you were really operating a store: get change beforehand, make yourself a cash box with your change, pens, price stickers and a calculator in it, have bags on hand for people to carry out their merchandise (and for the occasional "bag sale" when you feel like some excitement).
3. Organize your items into departments. We had Kids and Babies, Sporting Goods, Apparel, Housewares, Books and Music, Furniture. I felt like I was working at Target.
4. Make your items look nice and appealing. As Jack said to me when he was merchandising his items: "if it looks like junk, people will think it's junk and they won't want it."
5. When you drop your prices, don't pull off the price ticket. Instead, put a big red slash through the price and write the new price next to it. Everyone loves a markdown.
6. Make a clearance table -- ours was "everything on this table 50 cents"--and transfer things to it that aren't moving throughout the sale.
7. Put signs on things in the garage that aren't for sale. Ours said "Not for Sale. Sorry. Maybe next time."
8. People can't resist a cute six year old selling cookies and lemonade. We made an extra $10 from our lemonade stand.
9. Make yourself a Garage Sale Mix to keep everyone motivated. Every time our mix came around to "California Gurls," Andie perked up and started selling.
10. Have a charity organization standing by to pick up after the sale is over. Sunday afternoon, Books for the Barrios came by and picked up a few boxes of leftovers.

Tonight, our garage and our house are all put back together, looking nice, organized, and a little roomier. We don't miss our treasures, and we feel good knowing there's a little girl somewhere in the east bay who got a cute pink trike from her grandpa today.

Print this post