2007 127 Yard Sale

Today will be day 3 of the 2007 edition of the 127 Yard Sale, "The World's Longest Yard Sale". It's been hot and humid so far which may be keeping the numbers down a bit. Today should be cooler and far less humid. Sunday they are calling for rain all day. We need the rain badly but...

This year we have 2 vendors besides ourselves-Jule's Knives and Dan The T-Shirt man with his beautiful tied dyed shirts and tapestries.

So far business has been steady but no more than last year. Thursday was very busy with a mix of locals and hard core 127 yard salers attempting to do the whole 1000 or so miles. It was busy pretty much the whole day. Friday was dead in the morning, maybe 100 people showed up between 8am and 11:30am. than things started hopping until around 6 pm.

This year we rented 2 Port O' Johns because I thought we would need them but now I think it was overkill and next year I believe I will go back to one Port O' John. To offset a bit of the cost I am asking for donations to use to crappers (this was suggested by 3 different people on Thursday so I decided what the hay). Port O' Johns are not cheap-$112 each for the weekend.

Unlike last year when Eugene put all our yard sale items between the barns and out of sight we put the sales items front and center and are selling a lot of them. I'd say as of yesterday about 40% has been sold. As I explained to Eugene when he wanted to put the stuff where it was last year, people do not want to walk any further than necessary and will ignore your items if they are not terribly convenient. This happened in spades last year. We did not sell many yard sale items and spent a lot of hours putting stuff away. This year I made sure to make the items terribly convenient and it seems to be working. Lots of things are leaving the farm. Jules says she is sellinhg a lot more knives than she expected as well as a lot of her junque. Dan, after a slow friday morning did what appeared to be brisk sales in the afternoon. I bought two nice shirts for myself and Eugene.

This year I am selling water and pop. Last year we did not sell many drinks as all I had was water. So I added pop and flavopred water to the choices and we have about sold out of bottled water (plain and flavored) but have not sold many sodas. I do not know what I will do with any extra soda-I got all Coke products and I cannot drink Coke or Diet Coke (both make me ill) and I do not tend to drink much pop anyway, maybe 2 or 3 times a year. I am also selling hot dogs, most of which are being eaten by us vendors. There seems to be a lot of resistance to dawgs. Several times a husband/Male SO would see the HD's and suggest to his Wife/Female SO that they get a couple for lunch. The woman almost always nixes the idea. Might not do dogs again or maybe do dawgs and burgers and some sort of fruit

Anything that does not sell will be put in a pile by the road and I will put a posting on the local FreeCycle lists and hopefully someone will come and get it all. If not, it goes to the Preble County landfill.

Unlike last year, we did not buy corn to resell so we are not selling much in the way of produce. We have our own corn but it is pitiful-the ears are about 5" long and not well filled out. Mainly due to the drought conditions. Corn needs a lot of water to get big. But at least we did not buy the corn so we do not have to make our money back on it. We would sell a lot of tomatoes if he big red ones would get ripe. All we have right now are cherry maters and Big yellow Heirlooms that are drop dead delicious but a bad seller because they are not red and round with little taste. Perhaps I should be pushing samples.

Well, by the clock on the menu bar it is time to go set up for Yard Sale action.