Mass garage sales cause massive headache

Tag : inflatable toys

With more residents trying to increase their income via such sales,the city of Weymouth, in Massachusetts, for example, has limitedyard sales to just three a year per address.
Detective Sgt Richard Fuller said it was now common to see 15 carsparked in front of a house.
Richmond, Indiana, has seen so many garage sale signs posted in theright of way that the city has placed stickers on prominent lightpoles warning of violations and fines.
But it is a difficult task: In many cities, restricting residentsto a certain number of garage sales a year is widely ignored,reported The New York Times.
So the sales go on, and indeed, as the signs often announce,everything must go - from Christmas ornaments to microwave ovensand even toys.
Three-year-old Marita Duarte's tricycle was sold by her mother,Beatriz, to a stranger for US$3 ($4.50) even as her daughter wasriding it.
On Mission Ridge Drive and other avenues, lanes and ways in thisformerly booming community, even birthday celebrations must go.
No money, no birthday
'It was no money, no birthday,' said Ms Duarte, who lost her job asa floral designer two months ago.
The family celebrated Marita's third birthday without presents lastweek - only a small cake with Cinderella on the vanilla frosting.
They will move into a rental apartment next month.
It seems like an eternity ago when people in this city in northernSan Joaquin County were living - or at least chasing the dream.
Today, Manteca's lawns and driveways are storefronts of the newgarage-sale economy - the tell-tale yellow signs plastered in therear windows of parked cars Friday through Sunday directing trafficto yet another sale, yet another family.
'You can get great deals,' said Ms Sharrell Johnson, 32, who wasscouting for toys last Friday amid boxes of tools and DVDs and ahanging forest of clothing dangling from plastic hangers onsuspended rope.
'Sad to say, you're finding really good things. Because everybody'slosing their homes.'
The sales are part of the once-underground 'thrift economy' as ateam of Brigham Young University sociologists have called it, whichincludes thrift stores and pawn shops.
'This is the perfect storm for garage sales,' said Mr GreggKettles, a visiting professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeleswho studies outdoor commerce.
'We're coming off a 20-year boom in which consumers filledever-bigger houses. Now people need cash because of the bust.'
And when cash is short, sentiment is often the first thing to go.
'The cash helps a lot,' Mr Constantino Gonzalez, Ms Duarte'sneighbor, said of the family's second sale in two weeks, in whichhe and his wife, Julia, were reluctantly selling their children'sinflatable bounce house for US$650, pump included.
Since losing his construction job, Mr Gonzalez, 43, has beencutting back to save, disconnecting the family's Internet andlong-distance telephone service, and barely using his truck and theJeep.
He has taken to picking up his children from school on his bicycle.
The inflatable bounce house is the children's favorite toy, but thefamily's US$1,800 mortgage payment is coming.
Desperate customers
So it sits there in the garage sale, awaiting customers, many ofthem desperate themselves.
'We need to eat,' Mr Gonzalez tells his children about selling offtheir toys.
'I can't cover the sun with my finger. So why lie?'
As he spoke, he watched his neighbour across the street pull out ofher driveway with her family for the last time, their pickup truckpiled high with chairs, firewood and other belongings.
'Bad loan,' explained the neighbor, Ms Alex Martinez, who worksnights at an automobile assembly plant in faraway Fremont.
The garage sale she had held the week earlier barely made a dent. Back to News