The Last Garage Sale

Today George and I reached a milestone in our marriage. It was the day of our last garage sale...ever. As we trudged around in the afternoon sun, sweating and toiling we became aware that our wages for said garage sale netted us about 5.00 per hour. Plus I had to miss a tutoring session because of utter exhaustion, which would have netted me much more than the garage sale time I put in. 

And the really sad thing is that we appear to have more crap than when we started. We no longer have any pathway in our garage to walk through. So we are starting our process of recycling, giving away, advertising and leaving it on the curb in case someone will come by and take it from our bulk pick-up. 

But here is the good part. The best part of today was the people we met. Neighbors in our community that I now consider as friends. People from the FreeCycle Network online that were just names to me before. And some surprising behavior. 

When George and I have a garage sale, we truly want to get rid of the stuff. We don't want to haggle, we want it out of there, causing us to put some pretty low prices on stuff, even a free section for our fellow FreeCyclers. That was difficult for people. I would say about 5-7 people refused our low prices and insisted on giving us more. We were giving away a little old table that was scarred and of no use to us. Shopper: How much is this table? George: It is one of our free items. Feel free to take it. Shopper: No, really. How much? George: Please take it. You are doing us a favor. Shopper: I am not doing that. Here's 5.00 for the table. And this happened several more times. It was way cool that people wanted to be fair.

But we still don't want any more garage sales!