The Girl Scout Garage Sale

If you had asked me last week, the only two reasons I could come up with for having a garage sale would be to get rid of some extra clutter and make a few extra bucks in the process. I had completely forgot about doing one as a fundraiser, which is what Susan (and by proxy, the rest of us) did last weekend.

One of the Girl Scout camps that Morgan goes to (and Susan went to — Camp Ekowah) does not have a tornado shelter. Several Girl Scouts banded together to raise the money needed to add a large safe room to the camp. The estimate was hundreds of thousands of dollars, so to cover the cost each Girl Scout pledged to raise (at least) $1,000 each.

Even before the garage sale, several of our friends and family donated toward the cause. That got Susan close to her goal, but not quite all the way there. To raise even more money, Susan decided to have a fundraising garage sale. Lots and lots of our friends donated items to Susan’s sale, which we were very grateful for. Susan took Friday off work and spent the day (along with a couple of her friends) sorting, organizing, and pricing the items. Friday afternoon, our driveway looked like this:

Wow.

Saturday morning rolled around. I woke up at 5:45am to find Susan had already left the house and returned with coffee and doughnuts. After my sleepy butt was less sleepy I joined her outside to help move some more items from inside the garage to the driveway itself.

In the Craigslist Ad Susan mentioned “no early birds”. For the record, that means nothing to most garage sale shoppers. The sale was set to begin at 7am and by then we had already seen two or three shoppers. No early birds indeed.

As mostly a bystander, I found it interesting to to divide our customers into different categories. There were of course the traditional, almost stereotypical garage sale visitors — middle-to-older-age women who would walk slowly through the sale, picking up multiple items and checking them out. Then there were the obvious resellers. All of them drove pickups, some of them pulling trailers and almost all of them leaving their trucks running as they walked up, quickly surveyed the sale, and then split. Then there were what I called the hopefuls, who asked about things obviously not at the sale. “Got any tools back there? How about fishing poles?”

Of all the garage sales we’ve had, despite the Craigslist ads, Facebook posts and signs at both ends of the neighborhood, this one had the least amount of traffic. A few people suggested we should have put other signs further away pointing people toward the sale. We sold a lot of things but by lunch time it became very clear that we weren’t going to sell everything. Not even close. We did have several friends and family members stop by which was fun and made the time go by faster.

Susan had planned on running the sale until 3pm, but by 1:30pm it was evident the customers were drying up and so we called it at 2pm. With Susan exhausted from running the sale all day, Mason and I jumped in and began loading the leftovers into my truck. Even with filling the bed and the backseats of the truck, it took three trips to haul all the leftovers up to Goodwill.

After the sale was done, Susan counted all the money and ended up with $555. That puts her well over her $1,000 goal — by doing that, she gets the opportunity to rappel off of the top of the 244-foot-tall Leadership Square building downtown, and she’s pretty close to her ultimate goal of $1,500, which gets her Go Pro video of the event and a few other extras. Of course, the real reward will be putting in the tornado shelter for the Girl Scouts.

For me, the real reward was this baggie of Smurfs, which I found at the garage sale for 50 cents.