TILIG 03-03-2017

Of trash days and yard sales.

In my neighborhood (and I suspect in most or all of Karlsruhe), there are two days per year when you can put furniture, large trash, etc. out on the curb and the city will come and pick it up.  In and of itself, not that interesting, except on that day, the street turns into a kind of bazaar.  People walk the streets going through these things on the curb and take what they want, and the next day it gets picked up.

It can get loud with fairly large crowds milling around.

(Ok, this is a picture of Portland, not our neighborhood.)

Not everybody follows the rules, however, and some just put trash out.  The last few days have been very windy, and so now I can say that it's the second time this year that the neighborhood is covered in trash.   The other day was Silvester (new year's eve) where we had to spend a bit of time picking up spent fireworks.

In the US, we never had anything similar, unless you want to talk about yard sales (or garage sales.)

This is a day where a family decides that they want to sell things they don't want or need anymore, usually in their front yard.

Sometimes these days are organized for the whole neighborhood, sometimes it's just one family, but Saturday mornings are usually when they'd happen.

On that day, one or more families would have everything they want to sell out in their front yard and people would come by and purchase things.

When we've done it in the past, we'd try to price things low, but reasonably.  For example, a good quality table might be priced at 25$, even if we paid hundreds for it.

In practice, this never works.  We always found ourselves beset with ''lowballers''.  People who would come by and offer pennies (literally) for anything they wanted.  They'd ask how much, we'd say $25, they'd say 50 cents.

This strategy tends to work for them, as you just really want to get rid of all of the stuff, and get it out of your house.  Trying to haggle with the lowballers is an exercise in futility.  Many spend their weekends driving a truck around, buying things for next to nothing, and then sell them to "antique'' shops where they price them..... you guessed it.... At around the same as you'd originally asked.

In the end, we gave up on Garage sales.  It wasn't worth our time to spend the morning putting things out front, and getting a total of $20 for everything.  We usually ended up giving it all to charity. It took less effort.