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Garage Sale Mania: One Man's Junk Is Another's Jewel
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14552 |
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LIFE
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3 / 1988 |
1,110 Words |
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Sue Carlton
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Early Saturday morning, the doors of the Tampa, Florida, convention center swung open as, in a screaming rush, the bargain-mad shoppers crowded into the city's largest garage sale. Each was determined to be among the first to sift through the tables piled high with used toys, appliances, furniture, and out-and-out junk.
"Can you believe it?" a well-dressed woman asked, holding up a large pink and purple vase. "I've been looking for one of these forever!"
The event, sponsored for the last twenty-four years by the Junior League of Women, raises thirty to forty thousand dollars per year. Items are donated discards that have been gathering dust in family closets and attics. As one Junior Leaguer put it, one man's uninteresting and stored-away painting is another man's newly bought and proudly displayed work of art.
A young man left the sale with a huge stuffed dog under one arm--a five dollar purchase. "I spent twenty dollars at a theme park trying to win one of these," he said.
An American phenomenon
Garage sales have become familiar suburban American events, where middle-class families fling open their garages and set up shop on their lawns and porches for fun and profit.
While many countries have town centers where proprietors sell their wares, and the English hold "jumble sales" of donated discards at churches, Americans are apparently the only people who have developed the system of selling their unwanted things from their homes.
Dr. Jack Moore, professor of American studies at the University of South Florida, was interested enough in this American custom to observe garage sales over a period of several years.
According to Moore, garage-sale shopping doesn't seem to appeal to any particular age group, although women seem to outnumber men. He traces garage sales back to the "rent parties" held in homes during the Depression years. "People at the party would leave a nickel or a dime to contribute to paying the rent," he said. "And occasionally, they would sell a few of their things as well."
Today, however, garage sales seem to have little to do with a real need for money. "People seem just as apt to have them in a good economic time as a bad one," Moore noted. "That's what's kind of interesting. It's very respectable, very middle-, or upper middle-class."
Moore noted the tendency for a series of garage sales to occur in a neighborhood over a short period of time. "One family will have one in the neighborhood, and then it's as though they sanctioned it. Lots of other people in the same neighborhood will suddenly start having them. Then it will die down until the next time."
The results of cleaning out closets and attic are bound to be a bit odd. At one yard sale, an assortment of multicolored wigs, a plastic lawn flamingo, and an unused doughnut maker were observed. "The stuff you hate to part with because it's so wonderful may sit there all day,
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