The Most Effective Way of Organising the Garage Sale
Saturday, November 29th, 2008
Uchenna Ani-Okoye asked:
Its best that your wife handle the garage sale itself - greets the potential customers, “shows them around,” and generally engages them in conversation. If it’s a woman staging the garage sale, then arrangements should be made to have another woman “mind the store” while she’s out digging up more items for sale.
The advertising angle is really quite simple, and shouldn’t cost very much either. You should run an ad in your area shopper’s newspaper for about three days in advance of, and up through the day of your sale. Once you’re operating on a full time, every-day-of-the-week schedule, you’ll want to change your ad schedule and the style of your advertising. But in getting started, go with small classified ads simply announcing your garage sale, emphasizing that you’ve got something of interest to everyone - everything from A to Z. To get ideas on how to write your ad, check your news pa per for a week or so; cut out all the garage sale ads you can find; paste them up on a piece of paper. Then, with a bit of critical analysis, you’ll be able to determine how to write a good ad of your own by determining the good and the bad in the ads you’ve collected. Something to remember: The bigger and better your sale, the bigger and better your “getting started” ads should be. And the secret to outstanding garage sale profits is in having the widest or largest selection of merchandise.
You should have made an old-fashioned “sandwich board” sign to display in front of your house when your garage sale is open for business. This will pull in your neighbours, if you haven’t already informed them, and attract the people driving by. Sandwich boards are sometimes set out at key traffic intersections not far from the site of the garage sale, to attract attention and point the way. (Check local ordinances to see if this is permitted in your area.)
Another sign idea practiced by a few really sharp operators is the old Burma shave roadside pointers. Here, you simply take a few cute sayings in verse (or one-liners), write on pieces of cardboard and tack onto the power poles at about 200 yard intervals on a thoroughfare leading to your garage sale. You’ll create a lot of traffic for yourself! Simply visit the public library and check out a book on limericks, adapt the ones you find humorous, and start making signs. One word he re though: Be sure to check your local ordinances before you start nailing signs to power poles.
By all means, search out and use all the free bulletin boards in your area. It’s better, and usually much more profitable, to take the time to make up an attention grabbing circular you can post on these bulletin boards than just using a written 3 by 5 card announcement.
To do this, pick up some “transfer lettering,” go through your newspapers and old magazines for interesting illustrations, graphics and pictures, then with a little bit of imagination, make up an 8 1/2 by 11 poster-type announcement of y our sale. When you’ve got it pasted up, take it to any quick print shop and have them print up 50 to 100 copies for you. The cost should not come to more than six or seven dollars.
If you make this “circular/poster” up with versatility and long-time usage in mind, you can use it over and over again, simply by pasting on a new date. In case you were puzzled when we talk about “pasting,” this is simply pasting another piece of paper onto the overall page. Say you have a circular with a date of Wednesday, March 1st, and want to change it to read Thursday, July 16th. Rather than do the whole thing over, simply write out the new date with your transfer letters on a separate sheet of paper, cut out to fit in the space occupied by the old date, and paste the new date over the old date. A good paste to use for this purpose is rubber cement. That’s all there is to it; the printer does the rest.
MICKEY
Its best that your wife handle the garage sale itself - greets the potential customers, “shows them around,” and generally engages them in conversation. If it’s a woman staging the garage sale, then arrangements should be made to have another woman “mind the store” while she’s out digging up more items for sale.
The advertising angle is really quite simple, and shouldn’t cost very much either. You should run an ad in your area shopper’s newspaper for about three days in advance of, and up through the day of your sale. Once you’re operating on a full time, every-day-of-the-week schedule, you’ll want to change your ad schedule and the style of your advertising. But in getting started, go with small classified ads simply announcing your garage sale, emphasizing that you’ve got something of interest to everyone - everything from A to Z. To get ideas on how to write your ad, check your news pa per for a week or so; cut out all the garage sale ads you can find; paste them up on a piece of paper. Then, with a bit of critical analysis, you’ll be able to determine how to write a good ad of your own by determining the good and the bad in the ads you’ve collected. Something to remember: The bigger and better your sale, the bigger and better your “getting started” ads should be. And the secret to outstanding garage sale profits is in having the widest or largest selection of merchandise.
You should have made an old-fashioned “sandwich board” sign to display in front of your house when your garage sale is open for business. This will pull in your neighbours, if you haven’t already informed them, and attract the people driving by. Sandwich boards are sometimes set out at key traffic intersections not far from the site of the garage sale, to attract attention and point the way. (Check local ordinances to see if this is permitted in your area.)
Another sign idea practiced by a few really sharp operators is the old Burma shave roadside pointers. Here, you simply take a few cute sayings in verse (or one-liners), write on pieces of cardboard and tack onto the power poles at about 200 yard intervals on a thoroughfare leading to your garage sale. You’ll create a lot of traffic for yourself! Simply visit the public library and check out a book on limericks, adapt the ones you find humorous, and start making signs. One word he re though: Be sure to check your local ordinances before you start nailing signs to power poles.
By all means, search out and use all the free bulletin boards in your area. It’s better, and usually much more profitable, to take the time to make up an attention grabbing circular you can post on these bulletin boards than just using a written 3 by 5 card announcement.
To do this, pick up some “transfer lettering,” go through your newspapers and old magazines for interesting illustrations, graphics and pictures, then with a little bit of imagination, make up an 8 1/2 by 11 poster-type announcement of y our sale. When you’ve got it pasted up, take it to any quick print shop and have them print up 50 to 100 copies for you. The cost should not come to more than six or seven dollars.
If you make this “circular/poster” up with versatility and long-time usage in mind, you can use it over and over again, simply by pasting on a new date. In case you were puzzled when we talk about “pasting,” this is simply pasting another piece of paper onto the overall page. Say you have a circular with a date of Wednesday, March 1st, and want to change it to read Thursday, July 16th. Rather than do the whole thing over, simply write out the new date with your transfer letters on a separate sheet of paper, cut out to fit in the space occupied by the old date, and paste the new date over the old date. A good paste to use for this purpose is rubber cement. That’s all there is to it; the printer does the rest.
MICKEY
