The Yard Sale

Where else can you do so much work for such little pay?


Today my mother, my sister, and I had a yard sale in our front yard. Doing this required many steps:

• cleaning/sorting through the basement, numerous closets or bookshelves, and boxes of seasonal clothes to find the perfect yard sale items
• Boxing them all up
• Clearing off the porch so that the yard sale boxes could be stored there until today
• Pricing all the items, usually involving much discussion with other family members, sounding something like this:

Me: How much for this?
Sarah (wrinkling nose): You'll be lucky to get fifty cents. Who would want that?
Me: But its brand new. Someone gave it to me as a gift; it just wasn't really my style.
Sarah: I can see why they gave it away.
Me: Yes, but the purpose of this event is to make money, and someone might want this.
Mom: You could make more on ebay.
Me: I don't know how to do ebay and I've already been holding on this for years. I want to get rid of it.
Sarah: Then ask for a quarter.
Me: Did I not say I want to make money?
Mom: Actually I kind of like it, maybe we could make a trade.
Me: (sighing) Fine.

• Carrying all the stuff out this morning at 7:00 am and setting it up all over the yard
• Selling all the stuff to yardsale vultures who ask "will you take $5 for all of them?
• Cleaning up all the leftover stuff at 2 pm and hauling most of it to Goodwill
• Boxing up the good stuff, in hopes of fetching more money at consignment shops or the illustrious Ebay
• Stacking all those boxes back on the porch.

All that for $30.

What a concept.