Helpful Tips For the Perfect Garage Sale

So you’re having a garage sale, huh?  This means you’re either broke busted poor, or a compulsive hoarder who can no longer navigate around the decaying cat corpses littering your trash covered floors. Or you’re a desperate combination of both.

But just because you’re inviting countless hobos and neighbors onto your yard to judge your meager trifles of a life poorly lived doesn’t necessarily mean you should be wigging out right now.  It’s entirely within the realm of possibility that your garage sale won’t turn out to be a sad parade of your unwanted Beanie Babies, the kind of parade that no one cheers for, and no one shows up to watch. Especially if you follow these few, totally sincere steps.

Make Your Junk Look Real Good-like

Here’s a tip:  no one wants to shop your massive collection of unused ring-shaped baby teethers if you’ve just dumped them on your ant infested, weedy lawn.  And if someone does show an interest in 30 rubber teethers, they aren’t at your house to buy your stuff; they’re there to kill you quietly and eat your insides up.

The proper display of your goods is the key to getting that stuff off your hands.  So here’s what you do:

• Use your store quality display racks to actually display your garage sale stuff. Don’t just put them out on the lawn all empty.  Don’t have store quality display racks?  Are you sure you have enough good things to warrant a whole garage sale?
• Ok.  Fine.  Buy or steal some store quality display racks.  Use your mafioso connections if necessary.
• In the total and complete absence of store quality display racks, dump your stuff on unidentifiably stained blankets.  No one’s going to care by this point, anyway.

Greet Your Patrons With a British Accent

Even the people who already know you’re not British.  The British are straight classy and that’s a fact.  I would buy a lice riddled stick from a toothless street man if he spoke with a British accent.

And your accent doesn’t have to be good or consistent.  Do you think people shopping for dishes off of a blanket on the ground are going to know the difference? Go Australian but say you’re from Liverpool.  Tell everyone you’re a Beatle.  What do they know?  They’ll buy your stuff so fast it will make your face melt. Seven out of 10 Beatles sell out their yard sales in the first thirty seconds.

The other three are two Ringos and a Peter Tork.

Serve Absinthe and Chicken Fried Chicken

Just to show them you mean business.

Price Everything According to the Year it Was Manufactured

So a pair of panties made in July 1996 would be priced  $.71996.  If you don’t know when something was manufactured, assume it was July 18, 1977, which was the day Vietnam joined the UN.

All of your change must have been minted in 1984, not only because of the good luck that date brings, but because every other year’s money was laced with anthrax and no one knows it yet.  You should carry your money in a pig bladder, also for good luck.  Or just don’t have change at all.

Here’s a fun trick:  when people come to your garage sale, tell them they’re on your economy now.  And in your economy, it’s a flip flop currency.  So a silky cravat made on an unknown date would cost .71977 flip flops.  If they don’t have that many flip flops, tell them ‘Off with your heads!’ and then laugh loudly and run away.

That will tickle their funnybones.

Hire Entertainment

Remember that part in Xanadu when a regular clothes shopping expedition turned into a neon infused dance extravaganza?  With punks on roller skates and Gene Kelly doing the Cruciatus Curse on his film legacy?  THAT’S what happens when you get ELO to provide the soundtrack to your garage sale.

Maybe you can’t get the real ELO, or even The ELO Experience, an ELO tribute band.  What you can do is play the soundtrack to Xanadu over and over again, and nonchalantly set out several dozen pairs of roller skates.  There’s no guarantee that everyone will put them on and skate in harmonious sync with one another, but you’ll never know if you don’t try.

Keep Your Racist Knick Knacks Under Wraps

I don’t know why you bought them in the first place.  Or why you bought so many of them.  I’ve never once seen a black person eat watermelon.  Why you have 137 tin cigarette advertisements that are inexplicably abounding in black people eating watermelon is beyond reason.  And just so you know, Aunt Jemima isn’t her real name.  It’s Nancy.

So don’t just not sell your relics of an uglier America, hide them.  Because the last thing you need is the neighbors discovering your bigoted Ebay purchases, or how well you’ve lovingly cared for them.  And for gosh sake, don’t wear your ‘Whites Only Drinking Fountain’ sign that you had made into a necklace for some reason.

That was really racist of you.