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Spring is just now coming into bloom, so that means yard sale season for us. Without even planning, we drive by yard sales just doing weekend errands. Of course we stop at every one of them and fill up the car with stuff to sell on eBay. We still have tubs of unlisted items from last year’s yard sales on our porch. As much as we list, the abundance/waste is tremendous.
When we list, we photograph the coolest stuff first. Often these are the items that we think will make the most money, but they’re also the items that are the most fun to research. The more boring stuff goes into plastic tubs to be listed later. These unlisted tubs are like our “rainy day fund” just in case we ever needed quick stuff to sell. We have the storage so it’s not encroaching on our living space (important).
New sellers are always asking “what should I buy?” and our answer is always unsatisfying. If we find an item in a pile interesting enough to attract our attention, we’ve proven that there’s at least one buyer out there that will also find it interesting. This method has served us well for a couple reasons.
First, there’s so much stuff to choose from, we need some kind of filter or else we’d just buy everything in sight. Second, since we bring these items into our home, we need to make sure we surround ourselves with items we care about. We’ve been least successful when we buy items just because we think they’ll make money. Like toys. We don’t care about toys, they bore us, we hate to research them, don’t want them in our house, don’t care how much they sell for and so we won’t buy toys no matter what. This helps us at yard sales because the toy areas are invisible to us. Let others who care about buying and selling toys have fun there.
So this yard sale season, trust your gut. There’s always something out there you’ve never bought and sold before. Learn something new. Let it be an adventure that never ends.
In this week’s podcast we talk about these links:
–Here’s a cool short documentary about the World’s Longest Yard Sale.
—Another article of Etsy going public that questions whether the small artisan community can mix with Wall Street. Reminds me of when eBay went public and change from a flea market site.
–If you live near Novi, Michigan, there’s going to be a Scavenger meetup on April 28. This is being self-organized by Mark S. so go and help him have a good time.
–We created a public space where all of us can archive/share links for scavengers: https://sites.google.com/site/scavengerarchive/ Just email us and we’ll approve you to edit the page. don’t worry about it looking nice. For now we’re just gathering info.
This week’s throw back episode is from last year where we talk about “what if there was no more stuff to scavenge“.
And come rent our Farmhouse in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley. Even Scavengers need to take vacations.
The Weekly Scavenger Numbers
Our Store Week April 12-18, 2015
- Total Items in Store: 3845
- Items Sold: 50
- Cost of Items Sold: $470
- Total Sales: $2,819.78
- Highest Price Sold: $350 (Vintage photographs)
- Average Price Sold: $56.38
- International Sales: 3 (3 GSP)
- Returns: 2
- Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $120
- Number of items listed this week: 65
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