Make the price right at your yard sale

We here at Yard Sale Secrets try our best to explore every aspect of putting on and going to yard sales. One thing in particular that people don’t think much about  are the price tags you use at your garage sale.

After all, you definitely need them to make money.

There are about a billion different ways you can “tag” your items, here are just a few ideas:

PRE-MADE STICKERS: You can buy pre-printed stickers at Wal-Mart and other stores. These stickers work quite well for the most part, but they do have a few problems:

• You don’t get to set the exact price.
• Sometimes you run out of stickers for one price, and have too many of another kind.
• The “stick” of the stickers is quite variable. We’ve seen them blow off in a high wind! And they don’t stay in place after they get wet.
• Sneaky shoppers can swap stickers from one product to another. That’s one way to get a bargain, isn’t it?

BLANK STICKERS: Just like the above stickers, except without any price whatsoever. These are actually our favorites because you can write the price on them, write a brief description (to keep people from sticker swapping) and include a code letter to ID the seller of the item (for book-keeping purposes).  Still these have some problems too:

• Takes time to write out all the price tags.
• The “stick” of the stickers is quite variable (as mentioned above).

DOTS-AND-POSTER METHOD: Some yard sales prices are organized by a sticker color. Anything with a red sticker is $1. Anything with a yellow sticker is 50 cents and so on. The yard sale host puts sticker dots on every item and then hangs a poster describing the price that each sticker represents. Concerns about this method:

• Everyone working the yard sale needs to know the code.
• It can be hard for shoppers to understand.
• Pesky price-switchers.

TAPE: Get a roll of masking tape and label everything with an individual price, description and seller code. This is a very cost-effective way to do things, but has its detractors:

• Takes lots of time to do.
• The tape adhesive can get gunky and possibly ruin some items.
• Ragged-edged tape doesn’t look as good as those bright colored stickers.

TABLE LABELS: Some sellers do things the easy way. Everything on a particular table has a particular price. It’s really easy to set up a yard sale this way, but it can generate a lot of trouble too:

• The seller has to memorize where every item was placed (and how much it cost)
• Shoppers might accidentally or purposely move items from one table to another.
• If you don’t put signs all over the place, shoppers will get confused by which table has which price.

EVERYTHING IS …: In this method, you just tell shoppers “Everything is $1″ or some other price. Big or little, ugly or cool it’s all a dollar. This is crazy easy. But …:

• You’re bound to lose money, either by under-pricing great things or over-pricing junk.

BEST METHOD

So what is the best way to do it? We advise you to take your time, buy some blank labels and price your items the exact price you want to sell them at. It will take a little more time, but you don’t feel cheated in the end.

Along with this method, you can “bulk price”  items with a poster. The bulk price items mus obviously part of that set. For example: Make a poster that says “All clothes — 50 cents per item!”  Then every pair of pants, every shirt, ever pair of shoes goes for 50 cents. There’s no confusing a power drill for a 50-cent item that way. Or label a bucket with Matchbox cars: Toy cars — 25 cents each.

Just make sure your labels are clear and visible.

 

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