Who goes to garage sales?

We had a garage sale with our friends David and Kathy on Saturday. Or at least a front porch sale: we provided the porch, they provided most of the junk. And we made a massive A$31. If you looked at our porch before and after, I'd challenge you to notice the difference.

I don't know if there was some mythical time when these sorts of things did really well, but if there was it's past. People only go to garage sales for necessity or recreation, but the small consumer goods you'd get there are now so cheap that the saving you make between paying 50c on someone's porch and paying even A$40 to buy something new is not that great. As a rule of thumb, I'd say that stuff that costs less than a night's rent is usually pretty affordable to most budgets; and hardly anyone round here pays much less than A$40 a night in rent, even students.

Add to that the growth of searchable online garage sales like Craigslist, Gumtree, Freecycle, eBay, and there's already another, much more efficient, route to get this stuff at knockdown prices, or for free.

So without bare necessity, the recreational shoppers seem to be the only ones left. Our biggest sale in four hours was of a bag of junk that David literally pulled out of a bin in the basement of his block of flats. The only real customers were people who seemed to love the thrill of the chase, who looked on our display of junk as some sort of degustation menu of trash.

I can see the Lovejoy-style attractions of finding the gem amongst the dross. My friend Jane's antique-dealer father once found an 8th-century Byzantine silver reliquary amongst a box of costume jewellery at a car-boot sale (with a true antique-dealer's diffidence, he offered something like a tenner for the whole box). But there just aren't enough junk junkies out there to get rid of several years' accumulated trash in a morning.