One man’s trash…sold for a song!

Over the weekend I had the pleasure of working a tag sale hosted by my church. It was a fabulous time; the two women I was teamed up with had a great sense of humor. We laughed at inane things, all focused toward the items people chose to purchase. Stuff we considered worthless was flying off the shelves and of course we couldn’t understand it, because we wouldn’t have given a second look at most of the things we had put up for sale. We weren't offering trash, everything was in good working order and the clothes were clean and wearable [no rags!], it's just that there was so much "stuff" it was overwhelming.

This was a two days affair, everything was laid out and priced low so it would sell, and to help clean out the items quickly everything became half price at noon on the second day, and then at 2:00 PM, to ensure that as much as possible was cleared out before we closed up, you could fill a grocery bag for $5.00, $10.00 for a garbage bag. It was a lot of work and a lot of fun!

On Saturday it was about 10:00 AM, we’d had our doors open for an hour and were having a great time, people were streaming in and we were very busy. Then two nurses [the scrubs they were wearing clued us in on that] walked in to look around. One was a tall brazen woman, the other small and seemingly shy. As they looked things over they spoke loudly between themselves in their native tongue, and the tall one [who was obviously the spokesperson] would look in our direction, hold up an item and shout out a discounted amount in English. She didn’t pose this in the form of a question; she was stating it as a matter of fact. It was obvious that she wanted to haggle, but if a perfectly good duffle suitcase on wheels is priced at only $2.00, don’t tell me that you’ll give us $1.00 for it, especially if the room is full of other treasure seekers who would want the same treatment! I’ve been in countries where it is the norm to negotiate a price and that is acceptable [can be very fun too], but this is the USA and it's a church hosting the sale for charity for crying out loud. Regardless we were very polite and kind. We’d simply respond to her with a no, whatever the tag states is the price. It was amazing! At the end of a forty-five minutes of going through everything the vocal gal ended up buying three bags of clothes and two boxes full of glassware and dishes for a total of a mere twenty-seven dollars. She pulled out a wad of cash [which made me wonder why she was haggling over such small money], paid me and then two were their way.

All in all we had a great time, the people that attended were a great bunch of folks and we are very grateful for their patronage. We raised a little over $2,000, which will be used to help those in need in our area.

I’m starting to look forward to next year’s sale already! LOL!

CD~