How my friend had a $1200 garage sale every year

I just picked a random garage sale picking video for this post.  But this couple scores some good finds here. I just needed a garage sale video to catch your attetnion.

In the mid 1990's I burned out, after spending five summers as a TV show crew guy on shows like American Gladiators.  It was pretty fun to work on, but I was sick of working on other people's goofy TV show ideas.  I wanted to work on my own ideas, but didn't have what it took to sell an idea and make it happen.  I went back to Huntington Beach, and wound up working as a furniture mover for a local company called Happy Movers.  Yeah, every freakin' morning we'd pull up in a big truck that said Happy Movers, and a woman would ask, "Are you guys happy?"  We'd say, "No ma'am, we're movers, it's an oxymoron."  Moving other people's furniture and crap is a hot, brutal, hard, torturous job.  I was without a strong direction at that point, so I just rolled with it.

Since we did mostly local moves, in and around Orange County, California, we had one big tractor trailer, and 7 or 8 bobtails, also known as box vans.  Our Class A, tractor trailer driver was a skinny guy, with longish rocker hair.  He was a really cool guy to work with, had a great sense of humor, and amazingly strong for how skinny he was.  It was Dan who showed me how he managed to have a $1200, one day garage sale every single year.  That one garage sale paid his and his wife's rent one month each year.

Here's how he did it.  When we would show up to move people's houses or apartments, people were stressed.  It's a big day for most people.  Suddenly people realize just how much junk they have, because they have to pack it all, we'd move it, and they they'd have to unpack it all, and reorganize in another house or apartment.  Since we moved at least one house, and sometimes two or three in a day (really, 3 a day), we ran into a lot of people who had stuff they just wanted to get rid of.  Sometimes they'd have us haul some junk to the dumpster for them.  Or maybe set it on the curb.  But often, people would say, "Can you guys get rid of this old washing machine for us?"  Since I lived in a small apartment, I usually turned it down.  But Dan and his wife rented a three bedroom house with a two car garage.  Dan would just put all those giveaway items against one wall, and leave them on the truck when he and his crew unloaded.  On the way back to our office, he'd stop by his house, unload the washer, refrigerator, end tables, or whatever people gave him.  If the wife liked it, it might wind up in the house.  But most of the stuff he just packed into the garage.

Then, at least once a year, they'd have a big garage sale.  He'd have four washing machines, five dryers, usually working.  He'd have two or three fridges.  He'd have 20 or 30 cabinets, coffee tables, end tables, and chairs.  He'd also have boxes of random little items he'd been given, everything from dozens of ballpoint pens to dishes, to knick knacks, antiques, and toasters.  Dan said the annual garage sale always brought in over $1100, usually it was in the $1200 to $1300 range.  This was back in the '96-'97.  Their rent was a little under $1200 a month, and so the sale paid a month's rent each year.  And everything they sold they got FOR FREE.

OK, most of you are not furniture movers.  But many of you reading this may be pickers and flippers.  So here's where you can profit form this idea.  First, if you want to find deals on furniture and appliances, contact your local furniture movers.  They get free stuff all the freakin' time, like Dan and I did.  Most movers just want some extra cash, they don't want to store stuff  like Dan.  Have them call you when they get a piece of furniture or something that's decent.  Meet up, they may even deliver it, and offer them an amount that will pay for their time and effort.  Movers will often sell a $200 piece of furniture,that they got for free, for $40 that day.  It's very little work, and like a tip for them.

A word of caution, DO NOT buy electronics, tools, jewelry or video games and small items from movers, there are a lot of thieves in that business, and you don't want to be buying stolen property.  Or, you can give movers you number, and have them call you when their cutomers are giving stuff away, and you met them on site, and maybe pay them $20 for the phone call.  Most movers would be down for that.

The other way to use this idea is if you're a picker, someone who buys stuff at thrift stores, auctions, garage sales or where ever, you wind up with a lot of low end items.  If you have the space, just store those items somewhere.  Put them aside for a few months, until there's a lot of that stuff.  Then have your own garage sale, or take the stuff to a flea market or swap meet.  You might be surprised with what you earn for the "leftover junk."

Back in 2006, I was trying to get away from the downward spiral of the taxi business.  But I was homeless and living in my taxi, working 80+ hours a week in the cab to survive.  I stumbled into buying units at storage unit auctions.  I rented a big 10' by 30' unit as my "warehouse," and I startee buying units, and selling the higher end items.  That left me with a lot of junk.  Garage sale type stuff.  So I had my own storage unit half full of random junk.  This was before storage unit auctions ever appeared on TV.  Things sold for much more reasonable prices back then.  In effect, I had collected the random stuff, like Dan the mover did.

One day, there was a storage unit auction at the place where my unit was.  About 12 buyer were there, but there were only two units were up for sale.  After the those two units were auctioned off, the buyers were disappointed.  I spoke up, "Hey everybody, I have a bunch of stuff in my personal unit I need to sell, anyone who wants, follow me, and I'll auction that stuff off.  Here's the thing, I had already sold enough from my buys to make money from the stuff I'd bought.  Everything I was auctioning off had been paid for, it was all free to me.  Mostly I just wanted to get rid of it.  So everyone checked the stuff out, and I auctioned it off myself.  I wound up getting $250 for my "leftover junk."  And it all got cleaned out that day.  That's about what I was making for 80 hours of taxi driving at the time.  I was happy to put $250 cash in my pocket for stuff I just wanted to get rid of. 

Wheelin' and dealin' is now "Flipping"- and it's still fun and profitable

 The toys above are half of a thrift store purchase that cost me $1.90 in Richmond, Virginia, at the Goodwill Outlet store, last fall.  Dumbo was from about 1975-1980, and sells for $12 or so on Ebay.  I paid about 20 cents.  Ernie was from 1980-85, and was selling for $6-$8 then.  Since I was homeless at the time, Ebay was difficult, without an address, a bank account, and a place to store these things.  I tried to sell them locally, on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist, But had no takers.  I ended up giving them away.  Yes, I lost my $2 that time.  But the deals are out there, that's the point.

 Wheelin' and Dealin'
I'm a kid of the 1970's, my dad was what people called a "packrat" back then, what's called a "collector" on American Pickers, and what some people a hoarder now.  We didn't have the crazy hoarder houses you see on TV shows.  Even though we moved nearly every year our basements and garages were full of shelving units, boxes, and cabinets, all piled with pieces of machines, tools, gun parts, motorcycle parts, and random mechanical things, that my dad intended to fix or build, "some day."  Most of this stuff he either traded a friend for, or picked up at garage sales and gun shows.  So I tagged along with him, learning the fine art of "wheelin' and dealin' as people called it then.

Buying and selling was a hobby for my dad, and for most people into garage sales, back then.  The factories in Ohio, where we lived, and the whole country, were booming.  Most people made solid, Middle Class incomes, and making a living off of garage sales wasn't necessary.  But my dad nearly always made a little bit of money on his deals.  When my mom was a little short for food money or whatever, my dad would always tell her he'd try to "borrow $5 or $10" from somebody at work.  It wasn't until I was 14 that my dad told me all that "borrowed" money came from his gun money, well over $2,000, a few dollars at a time. 

Though my dad hated violence, he was an avid target shooter and gun owner.  Once I was about 8, he'd take me to gun shows, where he'd buy and sell guns, gun parts, reloading supplies, military surplus stuff, and whatever seemed interesting.  He taught me to walk the whole show, see what was there, and scout out what seemed like good deals.  He taught me to talk casually to people who had something he wanted to buy, and not seem to eager.  He taught me to walk away when they wouldn't come down to the price he wanted to pay.  That walking away, in a polite and friendly way, often was the trick that got the price to a decent level.  He also taught me to bundle a few things together at times, or add something in trade to sweeten a deal.

My favorite deal I saw him do was when friend, a guy from work, another avid gun owner, had a little suitcase with 30,000 pro gun bumper stickers.  Yes, I know a ton of people are anti-gun now, because of all the horrible mass shootings.  Those are terrible tragedies, and there is no easy answer to solve that issue.  But those incidents were rare when I was a kid, and target shooting was a common recreational sport, and many people in Ohio hunted as well. 

In any case, my dad paid $30 for the case of 30,000 bumper stickers when I was about 5 or 6 years old.  That's 1/10th of a cent each.  There were 6 different bumper stickers, and he had 5,000 of each.  For the next ten years, I watched my dad sell those stickers for $1 each, 1,000 times what he paid for each one.  I watched him add a few stickers to a deal to sweeten the pot.  He didn't try hard.  Bumper stickers were a natural trading item at gun shows.  Ultimately, my dad made well over $300 cash for his $30 investment, and got another $300 to $500 in trade, maybe more.  Then, with my mom sick of seeing that little case in the basement, he sold the case, and the 20,000 or so remaining stickers, to another guy, for $30.  Watching him milk that $30 investment for a decade, in my childhood, was a great lesson.

In today's world, the high paying factory jobs are mostly gone.  Tens of millions of people are struggling.  More important, we have the internet, computers, and smart phones, which offer a whole bunch of new ways to both buy an sell things, to a much, much wider audience.  Flipping, as wheelin' and dealin' is now called, and retail arbitrage (buying consumer goods at one store and selling somewhere else), is a huge industry.  Ebay, Amazon resellers, online stores, and all the other web platforms  and apps, have tens of millions of items, new and used, that people are buying cheap and reselling somewhere else. 

My own main experience in this was mostly from buying units at storage unit auctions, which I discovered accidentally in about 2005.  I tried to turn this into a business to escape the downward spiral of the taxi industry, and I did make money consistently.  But I was working 80 + hours a week in the cab, and I didn't make enough to make it a career.  The funny thing is, the Storage Wars TV show started a couple of years later, and Daryl, "The Gambler" on the show, is from Huntington Beach, where I lived, and he was at the first storage auction I ever went to .

This is a Snoopy/Peanuts colorform set, where you have the little, rubber, flat people inside, and you stick them on the background scene in some way.  This version, with the circle seal in the lower right corner, is the 35th anniversary remake of the original set.  I bought this for about 20 cents (paid by the pound) at a Goodwill outlet store.  These sell for $9-$10 on Ebay, and the 1972 originals sell for about $20.

I'll go into more detail in future posts on flipping ideas.  But here are some places you can buy items to flip: garage sales, thrift stores, auctions of all kinds, online auctions, Craigslist, and Chinese distributors like Alli Express.  

Here's where you can sell these items at a higher price (hopefully)- Ebay, a Shopify or other online store, your personal website, Facebook Marketplace, Let Go, Wallapop, the local flea market or swap meet, or Craigslist.  

You get the idea.  For more ideas on how to make some extra cash, or how to help get your own small business going, check out WPOS Kreative on Pinterest.