Aug 26 2008
How to Have a Successful Garage Sale Tip #7
Tip #7 – Price Your Items
Pricing items for your garage sale can be time-consuming and tedious, but it’s also beneficial for you and your shoppers.
If you price items as you set them aside for your sale, it’s not as daunting of a task as it would be if you priced all your items at once. Use pricing stickers or even a small piece of masking tape, and a crisp, black marker. Make your prices legible. If more than one person is participating in your sale, include your initial or some other distinguishing mark on your tag so that profits are divided up properly at the end of the sale.
If you have a large quantity of one type of item, you can probably get by with a pricing sign, rather than pricing each item individually. I do this with books and clothes. I gather all my books together and put up a sign that says “Books, 25¢ each or 5 for $1”. Generally, at least in my experience, people are more likely to buy 5 books when the sign is worded this way; after all, who can resist a bargain?
Another thing you can do is have table prices, such as “everything on this table, $1”. If you do this though, periodically check the table to make sure some sneaky shopper hasn’t placed grandma’s antique do-hickey on the $1 table and removed your $10 price tag.
When I go to a sale, I like to know how much I’m spending before I get to the cashier. I personally hate sales where items are not priced. Two recent incidents illustrate why.
Last weekend I went to a sale where some items were priced (there were signs for books and clothes), and some were unmarked. When someone was interested in an item, they had to take it up to the woman running the sale, who would then quote a price. Nine times out of ten, the price seemed ridiculous for the item and the shopper usually put it back. I was there long enough that I saw two different people take the same item up to the woman. Each person was quoted a different price for the same item. The woman holding the sale seemed to be pricing the people rather than the item. She had several books that I was interested in, but after I witnessed her pricing game, I left the books and walked away.
Several months ago, my brother and sister-in-law had a sale. Since my husband and I were getting ready to move, they let us put items in their sale; in exchange, we went and helped them out at the sale. I had priced each one of my items; my sister-in-law had not. Even though I had less ‘stuff’ in the sale, I sold more, and I believe it was because my items were priced. Another thing that hurt them was communication. If you’re going to have a sale and not price your items, make sure that everyone helping out with the sale knows how much you want for your items. At one point my sister-in-law left my brother in charge while she ran some errands. A shopper came in while my sister-in-law was gone, and was interested in a particular item that was not priced. My brother quoted her a price, and the woman bought the item. My sister-in-law returned and saw that the item was gone. She asked my brother what he got for it, and was then upset with him because he quoted a lower price than she would have. If the item had been labeled with the price my sister-in-law wanted, there wouldn’t have been a [problem.
Price your items sensibly, no matter what method you use. Probably no one is going to pay $3 for your half-used can of White Rain hairspray from the 70s. (Seriously, I saw this recently. I remember my mom using that stuff. Do they even still make this?). And, if you have people helping you at your sale, make sure everyone knows the going price for all the items.
