Garage Sale Research Articles

Garage Sales Make Good Neighbors: Building Community through Neighborhood Sales

This article explores the community-building potential of neighborhood garage sales, focusing on case examples in suburban developments and city block sales, and contrasting them with student housing, town/rural, and cooperative sales. Under the auspices of attracting more shoppers and making some extra money by cleaning out unneeded goods, neighborhood sales get residents out of their dwellings and mingling among themselves, sometimes for the first time. Some neighborhood sales have been organized expressly for the purpose of getting the neighbors to know one another in areas undergoing transition. They provide a positive means to combat a perceived “decline of community” in the United States today, developing both bonding and binding social capital. The most successful sales for community building occur in neighborhoods that have: houses relatively close together with a high density of sales to facilitate walking; few other community integrating activities; capable organizers with a vision of community;...

Special Money: Ithaca "Hours" and Garage Sales

This article explores how are used in two different sites of the alternative economy, the U.S. garage sale and a local barter currency called Ithaca HOURS, and how they are socially demarcated as styles of exchange. Although characterized by different money in both venues create value in the interstices of the mainstream economy; stretch the value of money, while allowing direct negotiation; foster justice in the marketplace; build community; encourage good ecological practice; and enable participants to at times beat the system of the prevailing economy. HOURS and garage sales, while not capable of superceding global capitalism, rely on and complement the mainstream economic order, and both sites afford glimpses of more humane and empowering ways to exchange goods and services. (Garage sales, Ithaca HOURS, local currency, United States) ********** Whether segregating pots of money for earmarked purposes such as rent, entertainment, or retirement, or creating different forms of money such as stamps, coupons, gift certificates, or frequent flyer miles, Americans generate various special monies with divergent meanings for particular uses, which have particular forms and distinctive social meanings (Zelizer 1994, 1996). Each form of money and payment generates specific social relations that do not readily shift from one use of money to another. Further, the meanings of are articulated according to their flows, i.e., where they originate, the social meanings of where the are used, and their future direction(s) (Carruthers and Espeland 1998). This article examines some social meanings of two examples of monies: garage sales, and Ithaca's HOURS (a form of local barter currency). In addition, it elaborates seven major overlapping and mutually reinforcing themes found in both modes of alternative economic activity, which are (1) creating value at the interstices of mainstream economy, (2) stretching money, (3) negotiating value, (4) working toward ecological sustainability, (5) creating justice in the marketplace, (6) beating the system, and (7) building community. By providing ethnographic documentation of social relations embedded in the use of money and of what some term the social economy (Williams 2005) or cultural economics (Gudeman 1986; Wilk 1996), this essay contributes to exploring the social meaning of money (Carruthers and Espeland 1998; Zelizer 1994, 1996). It also furthers discussions of the utility and value of local currencies (Evans 2003; Helleiner 2000; Jacob et al. 2004; Lee 1996; Pacione 1997; Papavasiliou 2005), and further delineates oppositional practice, or what Helleiner (2000) calls consumption-based oppositional movements. Such treatments are especially important in the West, where the overarching market paradigm can obscure the social relations and cultural aspect of economic exchange (Carrier 1997; Dilley 1992). Defined as the temporary public sale of used items from in and around a private residence, a yard or garage sale usually contains an array of household items and clothing. (1) These sales occur in most American communities, and are held and attended by a cross section of the population, particularly middle- and stable working-class participants. Sales bring shoppers and sellers from diverse backgrounds into informal contact, promoting an ethos of friendliness and egalitarianism. Public commerce and proprietary hospitality are juxtaposed, as sales transpire in and around the home and proprietors are selling (more or less) their own goods. This is important in establishing the breadth of social relations found in this exchange (Herrmann 1995, 1996, 1997; Crawford 1999), ranging from the highly impersonal and commercial to the very personal and gift-like. Sellers have a wide range of styles and motivations, from periodic house-cleaning and socializing to generating cash and profit-making, as do shoppers, whose motivations include recreation, recycling, and bargain-hunting (Herrmann and Soiffer 1984). …

Trust and reputation on eBay: Towards a legal framework for feedback intermediaries

In ten years, eBay has gone from a small website for trading Pez dispensers to an electronic garage sale for millions of people around the globe. Part of the secret to its success is its Feedback Forum. The Feedback Forum induces trust between internet buyers and sellers. It allows eBay members to rate each others' performance after every deal that was struck on eBay. All ratings are published on the eBay website so that other eBay members can decide who to trust. It is questionable whether this trust is justified. Although the Feedback Forum has benefits regarding honest repeat players, it does not provide any real protection against fraudsters. To create a truly safer trading environment, a more elaborate and sophisticated reputation system is needed. However, current intermediary liability schemes give strong disincentives to put such a reputation system in place. This article argues in favour of putting in place a legal framework for feedback intermediaries to resolve this problem. Trust in Allah, but tie your camel. (Old Muslim Proverb)

Consumer Benefit from Use of the Internet

The Internet is one of the most important innovations of the 20th century. This paper discusses sources of consumer surplus that are likely to exist due to the types of sites we see being used online and points to research that quantifies the consumer gains from use of the Internet. I also discuss the problems involved in measuring all the gains from use of the Internet. Websites that make traditional sales generate consumer surplus through availability, variety and convenience to the consumer. Price comparison sites allow consumers to quickly and easily gather price quotes from a variety of sellers, which results in the consumer paying a lower price. Information sites provide information that the consumer can use to pick an appropriate activity or execute a task more efficiently; often these sites save consumers time in mundane tasks such as buying tickets, checking the weather, or getting driving directions. Likewise, matching sites (such as eBay) improve transactions by hugely increasing the quality of the match compared to the local garage sale. While it's clear the Internet increases price competition so that consumers pay less for products, it also improves daily life by increasing the variety, quality and availability of products and information. These gains are particularly useful to people with high transactions costs (busy, rural) and uninformed people. Of course there are existing and potential attempts by firms to hold on to their profits in the face of consumers' lowered search and transaction costs. Corporate responses include lobbying for legal protection, altering product design, restricting the information shared with consumers (obfuscation), and engaging in differential pricing.

Three Paths to Disposition: The Movement of Meaningful Possessions to Strangers

Our interpretive research treats meaningful possessions as vessels of public and private meanings. From this perspective, we unpack consumer disposition of meaningful possessions to strangers at garage sales and online auctions. We reveal how a range of valences of self-extension and self-references other than the ideal self shape a meaningful possession's journey from self to other. We identify a new iconic transfer divestment ritual, deepen and reinterpret other divestment rituals, and uncover how a shared sense of self allows possessions to migrate across seller-buyer boundaries. We present and discuss the implications of a model depicting three paths to disposition.

Consumer Product Redistribution

Formats for product redistribution are emerging and evolving, creating alternative channel options for consumers' disposition of unwanted possessions. These retail formats operate in both informal (e.g., garage sales) and formal (online auctions) economies. As consumers participate in redistribution channels, some retailers are confronted with new competition and the potential for declining sales. This article expands on both recycling and disposition literature by examining consumer disposition behavior and the flow of used products through various redistribution channels. Strategies are offered to address consumer disposition behaviors as well as to assist retailers in combating traditional and non-traditional competition.

Haggling Spoken Here: Gender, Class, and Style in US Garage Sale Bargaining

Haggling Spoken Here: Gender, Class, and Style in US Garage Sale Bargaining

The Reading Cure: Books as Lifetime Companions

"When my son committed suicide I got through life reading the collected works of Jane Austen." —A friend My daughter calls me every Sunday from her Brooklyn home, and I instantly start to talk to her about the current two books in my life: one the book I am reading, the other the book I am listening to, an audiobook. She gets impatient with me. She wonders why I am transforming a personal telephone chat into a professional literary discussion—she is a professor of literature. I explain to her that discussing books is to me an intensely personal matter. She enjoys discussing the vicissitudes of personal relationships. So do I, namely those of the characters in my books. Books are my best, my most faithful, my most reliable friends. People have to meet rather high standards to match my books in terms of being good company. I am talking in the present, but books have always had that role. I remember thinking in my adolescence that life would be meaningless without books, and I have not changed my mind. I lead two parallel lives, one my so-called real life, and the other my literary life, which is sometimes the more compelling one. I read books for companionship, for enjoyment, for solace, for information, for distraction, for self-improvement, for self-knowledge, for understanding, for enlarging my world, for enhancing my compassion and empathy with totally different others. I now hope to give some flesh to these initial [End Page 77] thoughts and show you the crucial role books have played in my life. I grew up in Vienna, and my childhood was filled with mainly German books; but not entirely so because even then, between 1930 and 1940, many foreign-language books for children and young adults were translated into German. As an aside, I want to mention difficulties that translations can make: In Alice in Wonderland, that enchanting childhood book, there is a story of a mouse, telling a tale, and Alice while listening sees a mouse tail, a pun not possible in German. I only understood the joke the second time around, when I read the book in English to my children. By the way, the opportunity for a second time around for all one's childhood favorite books is certainly a major pleasure of childrearing. For me it was practically the best part, along with generally introducing my children to the love of books. Books were a different matter in my childhood from what they are for my grandchildren. One did not get them inexpensively in garage sales, nor could one borrow them from the local libraries, as is customary now. There were no public libraries. We got books for birthdays, for formal occasions; they were to be treasured. I was perhaps eleven years old when I received from my grandfather, who could be relied upon to finance special gifts for my birthdays, a complete collection of Andersen's fairy tales (translated into German, of course), and many of those tales laid a foundation for the things I would later grow to care about. They were sober-looking books, in two volumes, with just a few woodcuts, yet they became extremely precious. Who would not acquire compassion for impoverished children after reading "The Little Match Girl"? "The Little Mermaid" was another favorite; and imagine, I found myself crying, when, thirty years later, I read it to my children. That the singing mermaid permanently lost her beautiful voice as the price for being loved by the prince was a much better lesson than those derived from the Grimm fairy tales, where getting the Prince is a goal beyond which there are no further obstacles or consequences. Then there was little Gerda from Andersen's "The Snowqueen" who sets out on courageous adventures to rescue her boyfriend. Was it her adventures or the rescue part that so fired my imagination? On [End Page 78] a recent trip to Sweden I finally had the opportunity...

The Gifted Garage Sale

The Gifted Garage Sale

Negotiating Culture: Conflict and Consensus in U.S. Garage-Sale Bargaining

Although bargaining is often used in the purchase of high-priced items, Americans are ambivalent about the practice of haggling. The U.S. garage sale is one of the few venues where numbers of Americans bargain for low- to moderately priced goods, but common understandings about garage-sale bargaining are unevenly shared among American participants, who are accustomed to fixed-price merchandise. Students and foreign-born participants from cultures with more robust bargaining styles afford a contrast with the preferred American pattern of socially engaged bargaining, allowing the underlying normative patterns and strategies for American garage-sale bargaining to emerge. The polarization that can ensue from bargaining negotiations also highlights the underdocumented cultural values of friendliness and pleasantness that ideally surround commercial transactions in the United States. (Bargaining, United States, garage sales) ********** This article addresses bargaining in the U.S. garage sale, one of the few places in America where shoppers and sellers haggle for low- to moderately priced goods. Although it is not representative of mainstream economic practices, garage-sale bargaining does shed light on American values surrounding economic exchange and on the American ambivalence toward the practice of bargaining itself. The blatant vying for material advantage in bargaining reveals a set of values that, although always present in commercial transactions, are usually muted by the convention of fixed prices and an aura of pleasantness attendant to store purchases. The garage sale provides a site in which to explore the tensions in U.S. exchange between the socially affirming and egalitarian on the one hand, and the individual maximizing and unequal on the other, and to come to appreciate how the relative balance in the exchange shifts. Bargaining practice both reflects the veneer of friendliness of daily commercial transactions and at times lays bare the struggle for advantage that often underlies exchange. This examination of small-scale bargaining, sometimes over nickels and dimes, complicates the essentialized depiction of the West as a thoroughly rationalized economic system (Carrier 1992), affording a more nuanced picture of American exchange, and provides a unique ethnographic statement about this practice. The focus here is on the cultural aspects of garage-sale bargaining, although factors such as gender and class can also be important in bargaining practice (Herrmann, In press). This essay demonstrates that particular American patterns of garage-sale bargaining exist, if unevenly accepted, and are practiced with considerable inter- and intracultural variation. Roughly stated, there is a circumscribed range of culturally tolerated bargaining behavior and those who transgress these boundaries may be viewed as aggressive, self-serving, and even greedy. This essay also contributes to the growing body of literature on cultural economics (e.g., Gudeman 1986; Wilk 1996), particularly in the West, where the overarching market paradigm obscures t l? social relations and cultural components of economic exchange (e.g., Carrier 1997, 1998; Dilley 1992; Plattner 1996), and to the literature on the sociocultural construction of price in Western exchange (Alexander 1992; Geismar 2001; Prus 1985). After introducing the social and cultural context of the garage sale, the essay presents factors that influence bargaining there: polarization; paradigms and patterns; and pride, performance, and play. Many recent anthropological treatments of bargaining utilize an information approach, in which buyers and sellers have differential access to information, to understanding the practice (e.g., Alexander and Alexander 1987; Fanselow 1990; Geertz 1979). According to the information model, one quite familiar to Western consumers, shoppers engage in an extensive search for standardized or homogeneous goods, seeking the best price for fungible goods from a number of venders. …

Table of Contents

Abstract Highly Popular Event? Send Invitations in Phases Tour of Homes Tip Acquire Auction Items With Intrinsic Value Auction Is For the Birds Sponsor Competition to ‘Name That Event’ Plan for the Worst Huge Garage Sale Nets Big Profits for Florida Hospice Geranium Sale Grows Profits for Hospital In‐Line Skating Event Is Popular and Profitable Create a Checklist of Unique Locations RSVP Reservations: Better Late Than Never? Press Releases That Get Your Event Noticed Agency Sets Sail with Boating Event

Signs of Departure

Signs of Departure Heather Brittain Bergstrom One of these days I'll look back and I'll say I left in time Cause somewherefor me I know there's peace of mind There's gonna be peace ofmindfor me, one of these days -Emmylou Harris The first thing I noticed missing when my two sisters and I walked through the front door was the gold-framed mirror. Our mother had bought the mirror years ago at our old church's Annual Money-ForMissionaries Garage Sale, and I'd been making a careful point of avoiding it since turning fourteen and moving up two dress sizes almost overnight. The matching gold sconces were still hanging there, but looked ridiculous and uneven with so much bare space between them. My older sister, always more observant than I, also noticed immediately the four missing knickknacks, the missing embroidered couch pillow, and what looked Uke about ten missing books—judging from the dark gaps in the homemade bookcases that fined one waU of our Uving room and held mostly bibUcal reference books, a set of encyclopedias, and a few old hymnals. My younger sister, the towheaded baby ofthe family after making a quick dash down the hall and back, yeUed out with true eleven-year-old terror what my older sister and I should have at least suspected: "Mom's gone!" I Uke to think my mother's flight that day was spontaneous. I Uke to think she hadn't been trying to decide for weeks or possibly months which knickknacks she would take, which books. I like to think the note she left for my father on his desk was written in a hurry, not labored over in the bathroom during sleepless nights while he snored softly in their double bed. I Uke to think she grabbed handfuls of clothes out of her drawers and closet and 144 Heather Brittain Bergstrom145 shoved them quickly into garbage bags. I like to think she snagged the goldtrimmed mirror and pfllow randomly on her way out the door. I Uke to think she didn't have time to sort through the picture albums and that's why she didn't take any with her. As I did often those first weeks after my mother left, especiaUy during long Sunday afternoons between services or nights I couldn't sleep, I stfll like to imagine her last day as my father's wife. She went to work at The Donut Depot at five in the morning as she had been doing for almost a year—since the preacher at our new, more fundamental Baptist church decided she should quit teaching kindergarten at the unaccredited school my sisters and I attended in the church's basement and go to work where she could earn enough money to cover our tuition and help our dad with rent and groceries (and tithing). She wore one ofthe long double-knit skirts she'd sewn for her newjob, modestly refusing to wear the short cotton ones the other waitresses wore. I imagine she blushed or smiled that day when the truck driver, Stan, came in for breakfast around six-thirty and told her she was beautiful and he wanted to take her on the road with him, buy her a pair oftight-fittingjeans. As my mother probably did the first few times Stan told her this, I imagine she cried that November morning in the employee restroom, praying toJesus he'd eat his poached eggs quickly and leave. After about five or ten minutes my mother walked back out of the employee bathroom. She heard her boss yell, "get a move on it, Margaret." She saw the empty booth where Stan had been sitting, watching her with affection or amusement (I stfll can't decide which) as she juggled hot plates and refilled coffee cups, the hem ofher skirt brushing the dirty floor whenever she leaned forward. I imagine she stared at herself in the long mirror above the row of cracked booths she'd have to scrub with bleach water before going home to fold laundry, read the Bible, and wait for her husband and three daughters. She stared at herself, maybe...

PRESENTATION OF THE CHARLES SCHUCHERT AWARD OF THE PALEONTOLOGICAL SOCIETY TO MICHAEL J. FOOTE

One of the things that I love about citation speeches at The Paleontological Society luncheon is that the audience invariably is provided with little snippets about the awardees that give us glimpses into who they really are. I thought I knew Dave Raup pretty well, but it wasn't until the GSA meeting in Salt Lake City a few years ago, when Dave received the PS medal, that I learned from Steve Stanley that Dave was once an accomplished piano player. I know that Charles Marshall is a skilled speaker, but, until last year in Denver, when Doug Erwin presented the citation for Charles for the Schuchert award, I had no idea that Charles was once an award-winning debater. This presents me with a challenge. What can I tell the audience assembled today, as well as future generations of paleontologists who will read this citation in JP, that will reveal for them a glimpse of the inner Mike Foote? In pondering this, it wasn't easy to come with anything particularly enlightening. Mike is a good cook, sometimes brews his own beer, is a decent softball player, and used to wear two earrings in one ear. But so what? These are all fine qualities, but seem fairly pedestrian by the standards of previous citations. But then I realized that there was one thing, which I learned only last Spring, that probably sets Mike apart from most people in this room, not to mention most previous Schuchert awardees: Mike owns his own BOWLING BALL. And shoes. If you ask him about this, he'll probably give you some story about having purchased them for five bucks at a garage sale, and how they …

Thrift Stores, Garage Sales, and Flea Markets: Pop Culture, “Camp” and Ethics

Thrift Stores, Garage Sales, and Flea Markets: Pop Culture, “Camp” and Ethics

Exhausted Commodities: The Material Culture of Music

The twentieth century ended with the widespread conversion of cultural artefacts into digital information. Less attention has been granted to the ways in which cultural artefacts accumulate in the form of “things"-tangible books, recordings, and other objects whose economic value has often withered. This article examines the question of cultural waste and looks at those commercial and social institutions (such as the flea market and garage sale) which have evolved in order to keep old cultural commodities circulating. The recycling of old musical styles within contemporary practice is examined as one means of retrieving and revalorizing cultural waste.

Gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale?

The U.S. garage sale incorporates elements of both gift and commodity exchange in a dynamic tension, one that complicates traditional characterizations of gift and commodity as oppositional and mutually exclusive. Despite its apparently marketlike mechanisms, much of garage sale exchange also partakes of the character of gift giving. The elasticity in pricing in this home‐based exchange allows sellers to take social relations into account, so that objects that change hands become hybrid varieties of “inalienable commodities.”

Michael Flanagan's "Stations"

John R. Stilgoe History demands narration in this end-of-millennium era, when history and heritage collide and weld and fragment. Astute scrutinizers of contemporary painting have glimpsed the rebirth of realism as something reaching far beyond any formalist metaphor toward something else, but an that defies easy description. In Stations: An ImaginedJourney (1994), one of the most compelling books in the last decade, artist Michael Flanagan traces the outline of this else in an attempt to make sense of the image-rich late twentieth century, so divorced from the chronological framework of ordinary narrative history.1 Flanagan's Stations treats the past in a transformative way, restoring meaning lost to time, much as heirlooms lose their meaning when they are separated from their familial context. Heirlooms become antiques as family estates dissolve and items change hands at auctions, garage sales, and flea markets instead of being passed down from one blood relation to another. Storytellers can easily weave tales around antiques; after all, the antique has no specific history. It is merely a bit or piece of heritage waiting for a tale, a context, a meaning. By contrast, an heirloom portrait within its house is visual evidence of physical resemblances within families that span the generations. It is the armature around which specific tales revolve. Once sold out of the family, the portrait languishes on the dealer's wall and becomes a mere antique-its tales lost or perhaps partially reconstituted by some burrowing historian, its documentation of family cheekbones or brows dismissed, its whole being open to reinterpretation, falsification, and imagination. What if the heirloom were a landscape painting of the kind Flanagan creates to document and explain the evolution of our nation's built outdoor environment? Could it, like the portrait, be wrenched out of context? In Stations: An ImaginedJourney, Flanagan's paintings recreate a world from the late 1940s and 1950s few contemporary Americans remember and even fewer know how to analyze. Stations deliberately fuses the enduring mystery of realist painting with an awesome evocation of the realist painting's role in creating a past-of making heirlooms from antiques, of making the entire human landscape accessible again. Much of the book's text involves the struggle of its fictional hero, Lucius Caton, a former newspaperman, to make sense of his artist sister, Anna, a painter, and her husband, Russell, a photographer of railroad environments. No summary can adequately address the layers of character and narrative that embed Flanagan's text and paintings, for character and narrative produce in time a whole history that makes antiques not only into heirlooms, but near-magical items that sometimes scuttle the imagination.

Fear, greed, or garage sale? The analysis of military expenditure in East Asia

This paper examines the determinants of military expenditures in eight East Asian countries from 1983 to 1993. In a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis, it finds that the security threats (either external or internal) have not been a factor in determining the governments' defence burdens. Instead, economic and bureaucratic budgetary factors are better predictors of their defence decision-making. Military corruption and subsidized defence industries are the main domestic elements driving up the budgets; but this bureaucratic 'irrationality' is checked and balanced by economic rationality, for the defence burdens generally correlate with the availability of economic resources.

WOMEN'S EXCHANGE IN THE U.S. GARAGE SALE

Transactions in the U.S. garage sale range from the commercial to the giftlike, in a Maussian sense. As two-thirds of the participants, women create a sense of community through garage sale exchange. This article explores how women, partly differentiated along lines of race and class, solidify their personal relationships, transmit something of themselves with their possessions, transform their own lives in the process, and contribute to a broader spirit of community through the generalized reciprocity and even moral economy that manifests in giftlike exchange. There is an important link, both material and symbolic, between women's relational skills, their association with the home and the moral, and the creation of community in the garage sale.

Leila's Hair Museum

I started collecting art when I began my career in the beauty business over forty-six years ago. I began to consider the idea of a museum when I had too many wreaths to store under my bed. I opened Leila's Hair Museum in 1990 after the completion of a new building that also houses my cosmetology college and Professional Beauty Products business in Independence, Missouri. Although I have learned through my work with the pieces how to do the art form, I have decided that I prefer to restore and preserve the old art instead of creating new pieces. I now have 125 wreaths and over one thousand other pieces on display, all created prior to 1900 and all made from or containing human hair. These pieces include necklaces, earrings, brooches, chains, watchbands, watch fobs, hat pins, buttons, pictures, and postcards. I also have a hair tree made from the of several members of one family. The wreaths, many hanging in their original frames, were considered art at the time they were made, and most were made in a horseshoe shape so that more could be added as the family grew. I have a couple of wreaths made from the of two sisters whose heads were shaved when they entered a convent. Another interesting item is a homemade family history book dating from 1725 to 1900 made with samples of the family members' hair, complete with calling cards. I continue to add to my collection through antique dealers, garage sales, auctions, and people who have heard of the museum.