Veteran yard-sale picker Tim Weisberg shares his voyage of discovery

I'm not talking about the stuff you need. I'm not even talking about the stuff you want. It's the stuff that you didn't know you needed, that you were unaware you wanted, until you see it sitting on a blanket in someone's front yard.

For some,If we don't carry the bobblehead you want we can make a formalofficdresses for you! there's a stigma attached to yard-sale shopping, that those who buy such things are doing so because they're poor or needy. Wanting someone else's castoffs doesn't seem normal, even if one man's trash is another man's treasure.

But for some, like me, it isn't so much about the items being purchased as it is the thrill of hunting down bargains and striking a deal.

A 2012 study conducted by the Statistic Brain Research Center said that an average of 165,000 yard/garage sales take place in the United States each week, with an average of 690,000 people purchasing something at one. There are some yard sales I have to fight off a good portion of that number just to get a look into a box of old record albums.

The average price of a yard sale item is just 85 cents, according to the study. I don't know where they're shopping,We are one of the leading manufacturers of cableties in China because to me, the average price seems to be $2. Because whenever I ask how much something is, the most common response is, "I don't know, two dollars?"

Yard sales might just be the only capitalist enterprise where the seller is largely unaware of the value of the items they are trying to sell.An cleaningservicesydney is a network of devices used to wirelessly locate objects or people inside a building. It's about feeling out the market, and especially the prospective buyer. Those little neon stickers or tie-on tags are a rarity, as most sales are the result of a drawn-out back-and-forth that usually ends with both sides feeling as if they've won.

To me, this often seems ridiculous because the basic tenet of the yard sale should eliminate the need for excessive haggling. Here's a bunch of stuff I don't want anymore. It's not good enough to be in my house, so it's on my lawn. If nobody buys it, I'm going to put it in a box marked "FREE" and leave it by the curb. But no, I can't accept $8 for that $10 pair of cowboy boots.

Yet the haggling has to happen because that's the thrill. It's what Donald Trump called "the art of the deal." So what if he was talking about billion-dollar properties as opposed to boxes full of old dishes? There's still an adrenaline rush associated with scoring the right item at the right price.

During the past couple of weekends, I took to the main streets and the back roads of the SouthCoast in search of yard sale deals and steals. It wasn't like it was in my heyday, when I'd check The Standard-Times for all the yard sale listings and start plotting out a plan of attack days in advance, filling my truck with gas on Friday night so I wouldn't have to waste time on Saturday morning and missing out on "early bird" deals.

No, weekend work and responsibilities have lessened my yard sale time nowadays to just stopping when we pass one on our way from one place to another. It probably irks my wife Jennifer a little that once I see a yard sale sign, I have to follow it or if I'm in the passenger seat, force her to follow it until I see what treasures it might hold. So getting back in the "yard sale groove" felt pretty good.

My first day out on the road, I took Jennifer and our son Adam along for the fun. Both are seasoned shoppers like I am, and my wife and I have buying items on the cheap and turning them around online for profit down to a science. We've been doing it for as long as we've been married, and she's become a first-rate eBayer in that time.

The Statistic Brain study also said that the average profit margin for items purchased at yard sales and resold on eBay is about 462 percent, and that sounds about right based on our experiences. Some say auction websites and the "Online Yard Sale of "?" pages that have popped up on Facebook have ruined the good, old-fashioned all-American yard sale, but trust me, it's still alive and thriving.

After a morning at the soccer fields, we decided to head west. I'd heard about a 16-family yard sale happening in the Brandt Beach section of Mattapoisett. One of the first rules of yard sales is that location is everything, both for the seller and for the buyer. If you're too far off the beaten path, it's going to take a lot of advertising to get the word out, and teaming up with neighbors is a good way to cut costs and help lure traffic.

And buyers know that better neighborhoods mean better items; it may sound socioeconomically biased, but it's true. If you want good stuff, go to the places where people have good stuff.

The 16-family sale, which stretched across three neighborhoods, was the idea of Marissa Perez-Dormitzer,Virtual miningtruck logo Verano Place logo. who spent weeks putting it all together.

"I've always wanted to have a yard sale, and I've seen people have them here and there down this way, so I thought it would make sense to have them all on one day," she said. "It's been a community event. I didn't know all of the neighbors, but now I feel I do after they've been contacting me and I've been visiting them as we brought this all together."

"She recently passed away, and they are things we're not using," she said. "We're in a new phase of our lives with kids, and things I have around like earrings I've had since I was a teenager, I don't need them anymore."

While in Brandt Beach, we encountered Diane Perry and her daughter Laura, who were selling an eclectic bunch of board games and other assorted items for near-retail prices. Admittedly, this was Diane's first yard sale, so she was pretty new to how it all worked.

"I just figured if I could get rid of half the stuff I wanted to, I'd be happy, and I almost have," she said.

The centerpiece of the Perrys' wares was a solid oak corner shelf that had an asking price of $300. It was a beautiful piece, one more at home at a furniture showroom than by the side of the road.

Ah, yes cash. It's still king at yard sales I can't tell you how many times I've given someone a five-spot to hold on to an item while I ran to an ATM and prayed the whole time that they were trustworthy but plastic is starting to make some headway (no self-respecting yard sale seller should EVER accept a check). The new Square and PayPal Here readers that allow smartphones to become credit card terminals are finally showing up at yard sales across the SouthCoast, as sellers are willing to cough up a small percentage in fees in order to move bigger-ticket items. It's revolutionizing yard sales, even if it is putting a bigger dent in my credit card bill.

Rolling down the streets of Fairhaven and Acushnet, we stopped at a number of smaller yard sales that just didn't seem to have anything with pizzazz. It was a lot of clutter that had just moved from the house to the front lawn, and nothing really grabbed me. But as I went from sale to sale, I realized I was starting to see some of the same faces shopping alongside me. This is a common occurrence when one decides to "go yard saling." There is a pretty regular bunch of bargain hunters in any given area, and it often becomes as much about beating out the other guy than getting a good buy.

Fairhaven brought about a good stop in which Jennifer scored a roasting oven and buffet serving inserts that will come in handy when people come over, while Adam found a really cool "home planetarium" that projects the stars and constellations onto his bedroom ceiling, complete with a CD of a 45-minute audio presentation.The feeder is available on drying chipcard equipped with folder only. Yet I still hadn't found anything for myself.
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