How to Find Great Garage Sales
Most of my family’s necessities come from garage sales. I spend almost every week May through September hitting at least one garage sale. It’s great for a shopaholic like me to have another outlet besides Craigslist to get lots of great stuff for cheap. I wanted to put together a few tips for finding great garage sales so you can enjoy shopping at them, too!
I hear a lot of complaints about garage sales. Besides the part about not wanting to buy secondhand (can’t help you there, you’re already too far into consumer land), people complain they can never find good sales. Or they feel it’s a waste of time because it takes them three hours to look around different sales finding what they are after. I created a few lessons to guide you towards the perfect garage sale.
Lesson 1: Know WHEN to shop
This one is pretty obvious to most people, but good garage sales really only happen Thursday-Saturday. I would suggest only going to a garage sale if you’re visiting the first day of the sale. If you can’t go on a Thursday, wait until the weekend, and only hit garage sales that are open one day only (usually Saturday). If you go to a garage sale Saturday that’s been open since Wednesday, you’re not going to find much of value.
Knowing when to shop also means what time. Earlier in the morning is best (early bird gets the worm), but if that doesn’t work out for you, try going half hour before they close. I can’t always get going early in the morning with my kids, so I go in the afternoon before sales are going to close and get good deals because I offer them less. Since it’s the end of a long day, the seller is usually more willing to haggle.
Lastly, I want to point out that there are two major times of year for garage sales: spring and early August. Spring is because many people move homes in the spring and turn over their possessions. Early August there’s also an increase in sales because many have garage sales just before school starts. Also pay attention to when city-wide garage sales are happening. Going to a city-wide sale in a rather small town is what I would suggest. Small towns have sales that are less picked over and there aren’t as many sales to confuse and distract you from what you’re really looking to buy.
Lesson 2: Funneling
I do this thing I call funneling to ensure I don’t waste my time at crappy sales. It is similar to making a grocery list before you get your groceries. First, I check Craigslist ads for sales in my area, making a list of ads that are descriptive and put together. If a garage sale does not put up an ad on CL, that’s usually a sale not worth going to anyway. It is free and takes two minutes. If the person holding the sale doesn’t put forth the effort to put up an ad, what kind of effort do you think will be put into the sale itself? This is also the reason I only go to sales with more descriptive ads. If I see something listed on the ad that I want, I will definitely put it on my list of places to stop.
Once I have my list of garage sales, I map them to plan my route. If I don’t take the extra half hour the night before to do this, I always spend an extra hour in the morning at sales where I buy nothing and stopped just because it “looked good from the street.” When you’ve mapped out the sales, I usually nix any that are in a bad neighborhood. I’m looking for neighborhoods where I’m going to feel safe and have a high likelihood I’ll find clean, age appropriate stuff. I usually won’t go to sales in a low-income neighborhood or a development for senior citizens because I don’t often find clean, brand name, and trendy clothes or household goods there.
Lastly, I funnel out any sales that are not organized or clean. This is just from visiting hundreds of sales, I’ve learned if the garage is dirty, I will buy something I later find a stain on. If the place is unorganized, I’ll spend too long looking and might not find anything. You wouldn’t want to buy your things from people who didn’t take care of them, so skip the unorganized and unclean garage sales. I usually just pop in and right back out if a sale on my list gives me this vibe when I walk in.
Lesson 3: The Drive-by
Sometimes I don’t have time to plan what garage sales I will go to before heading out in the morning. Sometimes I am at a city-wide garage sale event where many didn’t advertise on Craigslist. Sometimes I decide to garage sale on a whim and need to know how to judge if a garage sale is worthy of stopping at just by driving by. I’ve gotten pretty good at scoping a garage sale from the street. There are many things I look at to determine if it’s worth a stop.
A lot of times, people stop at a sale if it looks like a lot of stuff from the street. But some of the worst quality stuff is sold at sales where the garage is overflowing with crap. I once went to a garage sale you couldn’t even see the merchandise from the street because there was so little in the garage, but they had exactly what I needed (12 mo boy clothes) and I bought four heaping bags full! Do not discount a sale just because it is small.
The other way I determine if I should stop at the sale is if the house is in good shape. Does the house look like the owners take care of it? Is the lawn mowed? Did the sale have appropriate signage to direct you to it? This again goes back to the idea of people who take care of their things have the nicest things.
The last bit of advice I would like to give you is a couple cell phone app suggestions. cPro Craigslist is the best CL app I’ve found. It allows you to make a favorites list which helps to save the garage sales you’re interested in. The other app I’ve used is Garage Sale Treasure Map. This app tries to pull all sales from the newspaper and Craigslist and map them for you so you can see the description and what’s relatively close to your location.
I hope all this information helped you in some way. Now the next time you set out to go to garage sales, you can spend less wasted time and get more great stuff!
Thank you for all of your tips. I decided to use Garage Sale Treasure Map to help with my garage sale organization but it doesn’t appear to be there any more. There is a Garage Sale Map and a Yard Sale Treasure Map – do you know anything about either of those?
Linda- not sure if either of those apps is the same as the one I used to use, but they are worth a try!
Melissa