The nice thing about the suburbs I live in is that we have a community garage sale weekend. That means that today everything hurts for me. Dragging all of my unwanted junk into the blazing sun early in the morning and then dragging what didn’t sell back into my garage six hours later has left me regretting all of the years.
I do confess I love doing garage sales. There is a fine art to figuring out how much everything is worth and what someone will pay for it. I have figured out the science of what price you want to put on the sticker, which is not the price that someone will pay for it. You will want to add two to five bucks to most items. You will have many people come up to you with an item with a seven-dollar sticker on it and ask “Will you take five”?
You also need to think about where to put everything. It is important to put some of the really nice items upfront in order to entice people to stop. I do feel a little sad when a vehicle slows down and the driver gives the contents of our drive a once-over, only to decide not to stop. Hashtag Sadge-Face.
Something I also like to do is to put a bin of colorful toys right up front. This bin has a “fifty cents each, or three for one dollar” sign on it. This has two effects. The first is that any kids who come along have a few moments to dig through the bin, giving parents some time to look around and decide if they want anything. The second thing I learned from Disneyland. Kids love anything noisy or shiny. Disneyland will funnel your family through a store after just about every ride, so you can be graced with the screams and tantrums of your kids and others. I always wondered why parents paid money for ridiculous toys and merchandise at the park. Now I know that it is a shakedown in order to purchase silence and appeasement. I am not a proud man, and I shamelessly took this tactic into my garage salesmanship. I only made about five bucks off of that this week. My guess is that the lack of kids going around the community garage sale this weekend means that the parents around here have figured out that this is one of those times to leave the kids at home.
So what does this have to do with anything?
First, I am sore and tired from the experience, so this is kind of a placeholder article for the week.
Second, there are some takeaways from this. Pricing matters. I do not think there is a “this-is-seven-will-you-take-five” system out there for digital goods. There has to be some kind of interesting system you can build to motivate the value-shopper systemically instead of manually running sales. Pricing also matters in other ways. When bidding on work projects, you sometimes have to negotiate with other people on the number of hours, billable rate, or features. I have had a few project proposals go south over the years because I would put out some numbers that did not have a lot of room to negotiate, and the other party was attempting to change the price. In many of those cases, I simply had to walk away from the project.
In addition to pricing, you also learn a little about product placement. What do you put in front and how do you arrange everything? I had a pair of benches for sale that I had covered with a number of items to make them easier to see and reach. The person who bought them had to ask me if those benches were really for sale because I had a bunch of stuff on them.
I suppose this is one of those things that is very “suburbs-ey” of an activity. I had some fun with it this weekend and I recommend it as an interesting educational activity. There are also some feel-good moments. One lady was buying toys at a bargain to send to kids overseas. I told her to help herself to a pile of them. It is also a nice moment when you see a kid find a toy they really want to have, and the parent spots a few extra things they want to buy. I feel good because it gets stuff out of my house. The kid feels good because they got a new toy. The parent feels good because they bartered a little to get the price down on a bunch of items. Win-win-win, if you ask me.
See you all next week!
