Location Pt. 1

There are two ways to choose where you are going to garage sale.  The first way is to write down a bunch of addresses from Craigslist and use your GPS to drive to each of the addresses you wrote down.  This is the wrong way — you end up missing a majority of the sales because most sales aren’t listed on Craigslist and your GPS takes you the most efficient route, not the route that has the most sales.  The other way is to choose some neighborhoods ahead of time and drive around those.  While this may seem like you’re blindly driving around looking for sales, it really is the more efficient method if you know the type of neighborhoods to choose.

Demographics is key when choosing an area for garage saling.  Many people assume that garage salers typically go to upper-class neighborhoods to find the exceptional bargains.  In reality, garage saling in these neighborhoods invariably proves disappointing: sales are relatively infrequent and those sales that do exist contain too many “undesirable” items, such as clothing and furniture. (Clothing and furniture are fine if you’re looking for clothing and furniture; however, sales dominated by clothing and furniture tend to have little of anything that I consider “good” garage sale items.  More on this another time.)

The enlightened garage saler goes to solidly middle class neighborhoods.  Not upper middle class, not lower middle class, but solid middle class.  In my experience, neighborhoods composed of older but well-kept houses are best.  Note well-kept; that’s key.  Well-kept older homes implies two important things: (1) the owners have money to buy nice things but (2) they don't have too much money so that they can just give the stuff away.

Once you’ve decided upon some neighborhoods to check out, you need to know where to drive.  All you need to do is drive the main streets around the neighborhood and follow any signs for garage sales you see.  Don’t randomly drive on minor streets in subdivisions without having seen a sign; you won’t find anything.

Note that driving is key.  Garage sales are too spread apart to justify walking.  The average person walks at 2.5-3 miles per hour, 4 miles per hour is fast.  On a typical garage saling day, I will drive from 25-40 miles but as few as 20 miles on a day of many consistently exceptional sales.  You just cannot walk fast enough to justify the time you invest.  Some of my friends have suggested biking to sales on several occasions.  I think this is an absurd idea.  Yes, you can bike 15-20 miles per hour.  Still, this is too slow when you have a 30 mile loop that you follow and you need to continuously stop at sales for 1-7 minutes per sale.  And what happens when you get that $5 kayak? (my goal is to get a sea kayak for $10 or less; no luck so far).  Walking or biking just don’t make getting your purchases home convenient.