127 yard sale 2009 Day 1

Alyssa and Sohpie are prettying up the Open sign for us. They spent the day with Alyssa's Grandmother, Rose McCoy, of our first time vendors

Day one of the yard Sale dawned clear and cool. By 7am we had 5 of the 6 vendors in place and setting up. The 7th vendor was a no-show.

By 8am the parking lot was packed with cars and this did not stop until around 6pm. It was the busiest Thursday we have ever seen-Yard Sale Madness!


A walk through of the sale around 8:30 am

It was also a bittersweet day. The night before we lost our dog, Arlo-he had a stroke we believe at 6pm and was dead by 10pm. So Eugene dealt with digging a very large hole behind our store and buried him while the sale went on its' merry way. Than one of our New vendor's got word that his mother had died around 10am. He had asked if he could give our number to his brother as his mother was gravely ill and he might need to be contacted. Well, he was contacted from around 9am on several times with worse and worse news. Finally I was in the store talking to his wife and the phone rang again and I said I will bet that is for you. It was and it was the news of death. They hung in there the rest of the day but around 5pm packed up and left. They will be back next year which is great because we really like these guys and they had a lot of interesting items for sale and really enhanced the sale.

happy shoppers around 10am

Other than death of beloved dogs and mothers, the sale went better than expected (and I had high expectations). I'd say at last 2000 people stopped and shopped. Probably more as we were averaging around 20 cars at most times with a turn around of about 15 minutes and lets say 2 people per vehicle. All the vendors reported great sales and we picked up an 7th vendor around noon (and I expect today and tomorrow to pick up a couple of more).

We put up a map this year and are asking people to put a thumb tack to show us where they are from. We had people coming from as far away as Los Angeles California and Seattle Washington. We heard that there was a person from Germany doing the sale that someone had met at the West Manchester sale. We came up with the map idea a couple of years ago and kept forgetting about it until mid Afternoon Saturday of those sales. But this year I remembered in June and reminded Jules and Rosie and they got the grand kids to put something together-A US Map on cork board. This is becoming a bit of an attraction for the yard salers which is way cool. I love looking at how far people come for this event. And it gets conversation started too. I would say about 10% of the people put their location on the map, maybe 20%.


We had Adam's Rib back again and they will be here today as well but not Saturday or Sunday. But who knows perhaps another food vendor will show up. We had several people ask about renting spots. One guy was nasty about it. He though $10 for a 10' x 20' spot was way too much and that he could set up for free somewhere on US 40. That's nice and I wish him the best. Than another guy asked Eugene about setting up and was back within an hour with his stuff. He will be here through at least Saturday and has a variety of tools and other items.

The day ended around 7pm and I was dead tired-selling to thousands of people for 10 hours is amazing tiring. That much people contact really drains the energy out of you. We were all dragging buy the end of the day.

Today is shaping up to be another spectacular and busy day. It is 7:15am and we already have our first buyers on site. An SUV pulling a trailer. Eugene went out to talk to them and found out this is trailer number 2 for them-these are serious buyers.