Week 5 [05.23.10]

Day Total: $0
Sales Visited: 20

Wow. Completely shut out this weekend. Today was a town-wide sale in a neighboring community, potentially ripe with opportunity, but luck was just not with us. It ended up being more aggravating than anything else. Sunday drivers abound (pardon the pun) and subpar sales. To top it off, the skies were overcast and gray.

We went to pick up the yard sale map in the town center, come to find it was $1. Our hometown posts the map for our town sale in the free paper, so this was pretty lame. We took our chances and actually did pretty well. Apparently there were 28 sales, and the sale in the town center counted as 7 different sales (we only counted as 1), so according to their math we only missed 1 or 2 sales.

Only two video game sightings. One dirty Atari 2600 4-switch with 8 games marked $10 firm. For fun, we offered $2 for everything and got the overdramatic mouth-agape stare, followed by an explanation of how it's a complete set. Really? I don't see the box or manual anywhere... The other was a NES with about 15-20 games, asking $2 a game. The older gent running the sale explained they belonged to his daughter (who of course was not there) and she didn't want to sell everything, only the sports games, which he was separating out when we arrived. We quickly surveyed the games and saw only commons, so we passed.

Several sales were down really long and narrow driveways, which of course caused all kinds of trouble because no one knows how to drive or park. At one sizable barn sale, some jerk pulled into the driveway and parked in the middle, rather than off to the side in the grass, and ended up blocking us and a handful of other cars. The sale owner, seeing the situation, told us and the two other people leaving that we could drive through his front lawn to get out. We were first to go, maneuvering across the small lawn and back onto the driveway. As we're driving back up the driveway, which on the upper portion was fenced on either side and only wide enough for one car, another car pulled in and began coming down, definitely seeing us. It was beyond clear that we couldn't back up, and there was no room for him to get by. What does he do? He keeps inching forward! Finally he realizes he's making things worse and backs out. This was the worst of the day, but we had similar encounters all morning.