Yard Sale: Round Two

Well, our yard sale this past Saturday was not too successful.  Despite having a very lovely early fall day, we just didn't get a lot of customers.  I think this may have had something to do with our signs (see below), but I also think it might have had to do with the season.  At least in this area, a few friends and I agreed that yard sale season is coming to an end, and people are just not out shopping for Saturday morning bargains like they were in June.

However, since we had prepared everything and it's still organized in the boxes, we decided to try again this Saturday.  Even if we have only the same number of customers, we'll probably sell a few more items and make the whole process more worth our while.

So, here's what I've learned so far from my first yard sale:

- It's all about the signs - I thought I had done well in making a number of clearly lettered signs, but I didn't make enough.  We should have put more closer to the main road as well.  Also, my lettering that looked really big inside the house was dwarfed when it got in the great outdoors.  Finally, a number of our signs blew down over the course of the morning, and we got an increase in customers after we got them back up.  I'm planning to try to remedy all these sign issues for this Saturday.

- Have plastic bags available - Several customers asked for bags for their purchases, and I hadn't thought to put any out.

- Price tags are probably still the ideal - My pricing system of organizing the items by pricing category in marked boxes defintely made preparing for the sale less overwhelming.  It didn't cause any huge problems during the sale, but it had its flaws.  For one thing, it was sometimes difficult to remember how much I had priced an item for when someone brought it to me to pay.  Also, items got mixed up when potential customers were digging through them.  Again, I think that individual price stickers would have been best, but this worked okay as a shortcut.

I'll report back again next week on Round Two!

Check out all the great ideas at Frugal Fridays.