Garage Sales ( #AtoZChallenge )

  I've been to yard sales that were in yards I guess you'd say, but I can't recall ever having gone to a sale inside a garage.  Does a carport count?...

       
Garage Sales

         There have been a few liquidation sales in my life.  Things piled up so much and due to circumstances I had to get them out of my possession somehow.   As a young man I left some stuff at my parents' house.  But at times things have gotten to the point where things had to go. 

        Rarely have I made much money with a sale at home.  Once I tried going to a flea market and didn't do much better there.  Maybe I should come to the conclusion that I've got a lot of stuff that people don't want or perhaps that I'm just not reaching the right market for what I have.

        The latter is probably true.  I haven't done too badly on Craigslist, but Craigslist is as far as I want to go for now.  There are still a number of things that probably could go on Craigslist.  I'll be working on that.

       In the meantime, there is a community yard sale coming up in a couple of months.  I might do that or maybe not.  But I better not keep avoiding getting rid of stuff.   The garage is poised like a sleeping beast to begin growing anew.  I can't let that happen.

        Sell, sell, sell!  That's my first focus.  But I think a lot of stuff will be given away or tossed.

         Except for the stuff that I will keep for the time being. 


What do you have that you can't bear to get rid of?    What is the dumbest thing that you hang onto?  Have you ever been successful with garage sales?

       
         

Just for the Records and the Winner of the Last Battle

vinyl 33rpm gramaphone records. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

          Over a year ago I put up a post where I pondered liquidating my collection of vinyl LP records.  Then last fall I did another post about how I'd started putting some of the albums up for sale on Craigslist.  At the time I was offering four sealed boxes of 50 albums for $100 per box.   I kept reposting these to Craigslist and waited to see what would happen.

          There were a few queries of interest and one young man even came to look through one of the boxes.  He wanted to cherry-pick through the boxes to make his own box of 50.  I told him I'd wait to see if anyone else would buy according to my terms.

          Finally, after five months of listings on Craigslist, another young man expressed interest in buying the entire lot of records.  When he came to my house he admitted that he was a dealer.  I'd already corresponded with other dealers who were willing to pay anywhere from ten cents to less than a dollar per record--an offer I adamantly refused to even consider.

          Anyway, this fellow came over and looked through all four of my record boxes.  Though he didn't want to let on that he was overly interested, it was pretty clear that he saw several albums that caught his attention.   He offered me $100 for the whole lot.  I declined and he started to leave.  Then with a deep sigh of resignation he came back and said he'd give me $200.  It was half of what I'd been asking, but I wanted to be rid of those boxes that had been sitting on the floor in the middle of my office for the past five months.

         I accepted the offer.   I was rid of a little bit more of my stuff that has been taking up space.  He seemed pleased to have more inventory to take to the record shows and put online.  I'm sure he'll make a tidy profit.   All in all it's okay by me.

                     Battle of the Bands Result

         The reason for my record update story was told not only to fill in those who wondered about the outcome of those earlier posts, but also mostly to provide some background information about my most recent Battle of the Bands selection as well as a few of the previous ones.

          As I'd mentioned in that post of last October I've reconnected my turntable and I've been listening to some of the albums I've decided to hang onto for now.  Each week day as I work on my computer I'll listen to anywhere from one to six albums.  In doing so I'm being reminded of some wonderful cover versions of songs and I've been using some of those in Battle of the Bands posts.  Some of my future Battle of the Bands match-ups will be also inspired by the albums I'm listening to of late.

         Such is the case in my most recent Battle.   The Sugar Shoppe is a group whose album I've enjoyed immensely since it was released in 1968.  (You can read my story about this group on my blog Wrote By Rote.)  So I'll admit that I'm partial to their version of the song Privilege.  They are the first ones I heard do this song so it's the version I'm most accustomed to hearing.

         Only recently while thinking about song covers did I discover the version of Privilege by Paul Jones.  Since I knew that the song had come from a movie (it says so on the Sugar Shoppe album cover) I looked on YouTube and there it was.    Paul Jones does an  outstanding job with the song.   I like the arrangement and the performance.  I especially like the big orchestral production.  I think Privilege is an excellent song and Jones does it very well.  

          But I'm biased toward the version with which I'm most accustomed to hearing.  The arrangement and performance of the Sugar Shoppe is likewise polished with pleasant vocal harmonies.  In context with the rest of the Sugar Shoppe album this song shows another facet of this group's talents.  I might be so bold as to put Sugar Shoppe on a par with the Mamas and Papas.  They were a good group that probably could have had a lot of lasting power if they'd been promoted better.

         In this previous Battle my vote goes to the Sugar Shoppe which means that the contest is a tie.

         Paul Jones              7 votes

         Sugar Shoppe         7 votes

        Not a bad contest!

         Should I have held out on selling my vinyl to see if I could have gotten more for it?   Do you ever listen to old records and recapture memories?   What do you think of the outcome of the Paul Jones/Sugar Shoppe contest?

Related articles

• Sugar Shoppe: A Confused Aural Memory
• Turntable Tuesday: A Dose Of Southern Hospitality With 'Keep Your Hands To Yourself'
• Battle of the Bands: Privilege
• From Ebay To Craigslist: Record Store Day's Highest Secondhand Sales

The Big Blog Idea

.....continued from yesterday.

            Once my job had ended and I was newly unemployed at the beginning of March 2009 I began looking for new employment.  I had not been out job hunting for twenty years, before the pervasiveness of the internet.  In fact, I've never really had to seriously "hunt" for a job for very long.  In the past,  jobs had always been easy for me to find and they usually came to me rather than me hunting for them.  I figured that with my experience, a job, despite a bad economy, would fall quickly into my lap. 

             This was not to be so.  Jobs were in short supply in the Los Angeles area.  In addition, I was under the curse of being "overqualified" which is typically hiring code for "we're looking for someone else".  I soon discovered that pounding the pavement and walking in to fill out applications was not the way it was done for most large companies.  Now applications were completed over the internet, which certainly saved on driving around and applying in person.  I began spending the day on the computer applying for employment online.

            Fortunately, after so many years at my previous job, I was eligible for unemployment.  I could stay afloat financially for a while, I just wouldn't have the extra money I used to have.  With the extra time at home, I began organizing and cleaning things around the house.  I discovered that we had a lot of stuff around the house that we really didn't need.  If only I could find an easy way to sell it to make some extra money while cleaning up the house at the same time.  That's when I decided to open an account on Craigslist.

           Things went nicely as I put up items on Craigslist.  I was getting rid of things and making some pocket money.  Selling over the internet was a nice easy way to do things.  However, I noticed that in addition to the email queries about what I was selling I was also getting advertising spam each time I put something up for sale.

           The most common spam email offers had to do with "make money at home".  This did catch my attention and I started looking at some of the ads.  Many of these had to do with making money through Google.  For $99 and a small monthly fee, the email sender would set up a blog for me and teach me how to maintain the blog which would earn money from advertising.  It sounded interesting.

              After some investigation I realized that I didn't have to pay anybody to set up my blog.  Google would provide me all that I needed to set up my own blog.  I followed the procedure at the Google site and put in my information to open an account.  That's when I discovered that not only did I already have the account, I also had a blog that was ready to go.  I looked and sure enough there was the Tossing It Out blog page just as I had left it nearly a year and a half earlier.   All I had to do now was start writing.

              I studied the Google tutorials and researched some other aspects of blogging for a couple of days.  I set up my blogger profile.  Then I signed up for Google Adsense which was my real purpose in wanting to blog.  I was going to become wealthy by merely sitting at my computer and putting up blog posts.  The Adsense notification advised me that it might take up to two weeks to get approval.  This would give me some time to get some articles online and establish what kind of blog I was writing to make ad placement easier.

             My decision was to start out focusing on Halloween since that day was coming up and I knew the advertising should be heavy for Halloween related sites.  I would begin by writing exclusively about Halloween since that was what my background had been related to for the previous twenty years.
          
             On the afternoon of Sunday, September 20, 2009 I began writing my first blog post.  It was a random stream of consciousness sort of thing with several uses of what I understood to be key words.  I included lots of mentions of "Halloween" with a few other holidays thrown in for good measure.  Then at 6:51 PM I posted my first blog entry called Halloween Is Coming.   No one made a single comment--in fact you can still go back and leave a belated comment if you'd like and even read that first uncertain post on Tossing It Out.

            And so it began.  For the next several days I was posting articles about Halloween.  The first word in every post was "Halloween".  I was doing things the way I understood them to work.  I continued to study the topic of blogging so I could understand how to get top Google search engine placement, more followers, and readers to comment.  

        I very quickly decided to produce the best quality writing that I could.  After all, I had always thought of myself as a writer and now I had an opportunity to introduce my writing to a wider audience than I had ever had at any previous time.  On my third post I developed my blog mission statement.  I wanted to treat my blog with a professional approach.  I wanted to take this blog seriously.

To be continued tomorrow.......

As In Moving It Out

        Halloween is sometimes inspired by yard sales--especially this time of year as some of us start trying to decide how we or our kids are going to dress up for the festive occasion.  Just a stop at one of our local halloween retailers is sometimes enough to scare us more than any witch or monster when we see some of the costs involved with putting together a decent costume. The fact that most of the costume buying crowd is usually making a purchase for one time use means that there are a slew of people out there who have still reasonbly like new costume that they probably won't wear again. For those who don't just throw them away, pack them away, or donate them to some charity this often means Yard Sale merchandise. Thus today's topic is tossing it out as in moving it out the door so it doesn't have to take up space that can be used for other valuable junk.
       Today I had a Yard Sale.  Rather I should say I participated in a Giant Community Multi-Family Yard Sale.  Par for the course, we probably had 10 or so households participating out of a potential 113 households. This was less than we have usually have  had, but even at that participation in our accumulated junk liquidation ventures is usually less than exciting.  Nevertheless, partly in the spirit of community involvement, but mostly for the purpose of getting rid of crap (or "another man's treasure" as it is sometimes known), I try to be a part of the fun. So today I was up before dawn setting out tables and merchandise and then waited for the crush of bargain-hunters that were to come.  Except they didn't--not many at least.  By 11 AM I was packing everything after having sold about $25 worth of stuff -- worked out to less than minumum wage when I factor the time I put into it all.  At least I filled my trashcan and recycle bin with trash that I decided I could part with-- finally tossing it out.  And I did reorganize my garage so that now we can again fit one of our cars in it.  What a concept!  A car in the garage.  The morning was not in vain.
         So to what do I attribute the less than stellar outcome of our sale?  Signage was adequate.  The folks that scavenge the housecleaning of others by trolling the neighborhoods looking for yard sales found us easily by the signs.  What we lacked was effective outside advertising.  We had decided to save advertising expense and forego The PennySaver, where we had found a modicum of success in the past, and of course, at least in L.A., advertising in the classifieds of the newspaper is about as effective as attaching a message to a helium balloon and hoping that someone finds it and tells everybody they know.  To save money we posted an announcement on Craigslist.
        In the past few weeks preceding my yard sale I have been posting items to sell on Craigslists with a fairly good level of success.  Craigslist is kind of like the world's biggest yard sale except that you don't have to stand outside with your stuff.  You just put it on the site and if someone's interested you make arrangements to get together with them.  Sure there is the creepy factor, but if you're careful I think you're okay.  I have people come to my house to pick things up; I insist on cash payment; I don't let anybody come inside my house, but transact everything in my driveway out in the open; and I don't allow anyone to come after dark.  I was a bit uneasy about dealing with strangers in this manner, but actually the people who have bought stuff from me have been pretty nice and just hand me what I've asked for something with no haggling.
Very much like a yard sale by appointment only.  So advertising a Yard Sale on Craigslist is kind of like advertising a yard sale at someone else's yard sale.  Maybe some readers have had some experience with posting your yard sales on Craigslist and found it to be effective.  I'd love to hear your experiences with this and what you did that made it effective.
       As I have been dealing with Craigslist, I have been looking at some of the postings and noticing that a lot of people are selling those old Halloween costumes that they have in their closets.  And cheap when you compare them to store pricing.  For example, there seem to be a lot of the sexy Leg Avenue costumes that you find in stores for $50 to $100 or more selling used for $5 to $50.  I'm pretty sure that they are usually almost like new and if you go to buy you can check them out and you're not obgligated to take it if it's not to your liking.  Likewise, I have noticed in many of the yard sale postings at this time of year people are advertising Halloween costumes.  I know I've sold them in the past very cheaply and somebody got a heck of a deal.  And didn't sell trash either.  Those of you who are already committed thriftshoppers, Craigslist junkies, or yard sale buyers know the advantages of this kind of buying, especially for something as ephemeral as Halloween.  And it's not just limited to traditional costumes either.  Make your own costumes with some of the retro fashions, hats, cheap baubles, or other accessories that you can often find for virtually pennies.  Don't throw away a fortune on a costume for one time use.  These are tough times for many and this calls for drastic measures.  And  even if times aren't tough for you, I'm sure you can find some better ways to spend your hard earned dollars.
      As always, if any of you have any experiences to relate, or suggestions, or debate to the contrary please toss it back.  We'd love to hear from you.