Let me tell you something right off. Most garage sales lose money. Not on paper, because nobody keeps the paper. But when you add up the Saturday you gave up, the newspaper ad, the poster board, the doughnuts for the family you roped into helping, and the fact that you gave a $40 lamp to a stranger for three dollars because you didn't know any better, you'd have done better hauling the whole lot to the thrift store on Friday and going to the lake.

I don't lose money. I've run a sale every spring and most falls since 1985, either for myself or for neighbors who pay me a cut (twenty percent, and they still come out ahead). This page is what I know. It's not complicated. It's just that nobody does it.

Here is the whole secret of pricing and you can stop reading if you want. Price everything at about one third of what it would cost new. Not what you paid. Not what it's "worth." What it would cost to walk into a store today and buy it. A $30 sweater is $10. A $12 book is $4. A $60 coffee maker is $20.

A third of retail is the number where people say "that's fair" without thinking about it. Above that, they put it down. Below that, you're giving it away. There is no reward for giving it away. The person doesn't thank you any more for a $1 sweater than a $10 sweater. They just walk off with a better deal.

Then, at noon on the last day, everything goes half off. Put a big sign up that says so at 11:55. This does two things. It clears out the tables, and it makes the morning people buy, because they know it'll be gone by afternoon. Don't be tempted to go half off at ten. The people who come at ten are the people who will pay full price.

Put a price on every single thing. Every one. Masking tape and a marker, or those little round stickers. People will not ask. They will pick it up, look for the tag, not find it, and put it down. You lose more sales to missing tags than to high prices. If you have a box of forty little things, put a sign on the box: "25 cents each, 5 for $1."

Round to quarters. Nobody needs to make change for a 35-cent item at eight in the morning.

Clothes are the exception to the one-third rule. Adult clothes at a garage sale are a dollar or two, and they don't move even at that. Baby and kids' clothes move, at 50 cents to $2. Coats and good shoes, $3 to $5. If you have nice clothes, take them to a consignment shop instead. (There is one with a page here on GeoCities.us, Second Glance Consignment Boutique.)

Neon poster board. Not white. The neon pink or neon yellow, from the drugstore. Cut it in half, so you get two signs per sheet. On each one, in a fat black marker, write exactly this:

That's it. Nothing else. Not your address, not "multi-family," not "lots of great stuff." The sign is read by somebody driving 30 miles an hour. They need three things: what, which way, when. The arrow is the most important part. Make it huge.

Put one at every turn between the main road and your driveway. Every turn. If somebody has to guess, they don't come. Put one at the end of your driveway with a balloon on it. Six to eight signs is right for most neighborhoods. Staple them to your own stakes, not the stop sign (that's against the law most places and they get taken down).

Put them up Friday night or at six Saturday morning. Take them down Saturday afternoon. I mean it. Nothing marks a person as an amateur like a faded garage sale sign on the corner in November. And the neighbors will hate you.

The newspaper ad: worth it, if it's cheap. Our paper does three lines for about $8. Say the day, the hours, the cross streets, and the three best things you have ("crib, tools, Beanie Babies"). The people who read the classifieds are the serious buyers, and they'll show up first.

Start with $50 in change: two rolls of quarters ($20), twenty ones, and two fives. Get it from the bank Friday. I promise you the first customer will hand you a twenty for a 75-cent item.

Don't use a cash box on the table. It walks off. Use a carpenter's apron or a fanny pack and keep the money on your body. When you get over $100 in it, take the big bills inside.

Keep a tally sheet. A legal pad and a pen: every sale, write the amount. Not what it was, just the number. At the end of the day you add it up and you know exactly what you made, and next year you'll know what to expect. Everybody who doesn't keep a tally sheet tells me they made "a couple hundred." They didn't. They made $140 and spent $30 of it on pizza.

No checks. Ever. Somebody wants to write a check for a $40 dresser, they can drive to the bank machine and come back. The dresser will still be here.

Your sale starts at 8. At 7:15 there will be a car idling at the curb. At 7:30 a man will walk up your driveway while you're still carrying out the card table and ask if you have any tools, or old radios, or "jewelry, any old jewelry." These are the early birds. They are dealers, mostly, and they make their living buying your good stuff for nothing before you're awake.

Here is what to do about them. Nothing. Don't get mad. Don't put "NO EARLY BIRDS" in your ad, because they don't care and it makes you look like a crank. Just don't sell to anybody before the sale starts, and don't let anybody in the garage. Say, "We open at eight, thanks," and keep working. They'll wait, or they'll leave, and either way is fine.

When you do open, the early birds are the best customers you'll have all day. They know what things are worth, they pay the tag price without whining, and they buy a lot. The lady who hunts jewelry took $38 worth of costume junk off my hands last spring in about four minutes. Let them.

The other kind of early customer is the neighbor who just wants to see what you have. Also fine. Neighbors buy.

Get the furniture and the big things out to the end of the driveway where people driving by can see them. A dresser at the curb pulls in cars that a table of knick-knacks never will. Hang clothes on a rope between two ladders instead of piling them in a box; they sell three to one that way.

And clean everything. Wipe it down, get the dust off. A dusty thing looks like junk. The same thing clean looks like a bargain.

At two o'clock, whatever is left is leaving. Not going back in the basement. Leaving. I've watched people carry the same box of coffee mugs out for three sales in a row. That box has cost them more in Saturdays than it will ever be worth.

Here's what I do. Before the sale, I call the thrift store (the church one, or the one that runs the truck) and ask when they can pick up, or what hours their drop-off is open. Then at two I load the car and drive straight there. Get a receipt. If you itemize on your taxes, a donation of used goods in good condition is deductible at what a thrift store would sell it for, which isn't much, but it's not nothing, and it's more than you'd get leaving it in the garage. Ask your tax person. I'm not one.

What the thrift store won't take (they won't take mattresses either, or broken things), put at the curb with a FREE sign on Saturday night. Gone by Sunday noon, every time. What's left after that goes in the trash and you don't feel bad about it.

Saturday, May 22, 1999, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., one family (mine), a nice cloudy day that didn't rain. Tally sheet says $611.25. Here's the rough breakdown from the pad:

Notice that the tools and the furniture are almost half. That's typical. Your money is in the big things and the good things. The quarter table is for keeping people on the driveway long enough to notice the dresser.

Best sale of the day: a man bought the whole tool bench lot at 8:10, paid the tag price, and asked if I had any more. Worst: I sold a cast iron skillet for $3 and my daughter told me later they go for $20 at antique stores. Live and learn. It's on next year's list at $8.

Print this out. (In Netscape, go to File, then Print.)

Questions? I answer all of them, usually the same evening. If you're in my area and want me to run your sale, ask, but I book up by March.