Jabronisism wrote:
A few of my neighbors wanted to have a community garage sale with everyone from the block. I have never liked things like garage sales, but I figured it might be a good way to get rid of some old stuff. My wife hates throwing things away, and I saw this as an opportunity to sell some of the stuff that she didn't want to "waste." So we contributed a lot of baby things, an old lawnmower, some lamps, and some clothes.
This was on Saturday. I didn't help. I took the kids to breakfast and then dropped them off at a friend's house and went running. I never saw anyone and the whole thing was cleaned up by the time I got home.
So last night I get home from work and I am changing to go run and I hear loud knocking on the window next to our front door. No doorbell, no knocking on the door. Just aggressive banging on the window. I walk up to the window and ask the guy standing there if I can help him. I wasn't going to open the door for him because he was kind of rough looking and seemed to be acting erratically. He holds up a toy cash register and says, "This don't work." I have no idea what he is talking about and he must have sensed that because he said, "I bought this at the sale and it don't work." It wasn't our cash register, but I asked him how much he paid and he said $3. I told him to keep the register and gave him a $5 bill, the only thing I had. I told him to keep the change and that I was sorry it didn't work. He said "thank you," but then followed it up with "too many people are trying to sell broken crap now."
Now I know why I don't like yard sales. People are fvcking crazy. I was a little scared to leave my wife and kids alone in the house to go run, so they went to get ice cream (brought me home some mint chocolate chip!)...
I have done several yard sales, I use to do one a year when I had lot of junk. They are a great way to get rid of stuff your kids grow out of or don't play with anymore. These things are very popular where I live and can get kind of crazy with the bargaining process. The good stuff is in the affluent neighbor hoods; I once bought a $2K+ studio lighting kit for $150 and could have paid less because she was willing to accept whatever I offered. Btw, lady was selling of her ex-husbands gear and practically giving away a lot of high end stuff.
The rule is and has always been as-is, nothing can be returned.