not your typical yard sale.

INDOORS from 1pm to 4pm! Not your typical yard sale! (Raleigh near NCSU)
This is not your typical yard sale. First of all, you don't need to get up at the crack of dawn. Secondly, it's indoors! Thirdly, we have a lot of really nice stuff.

I'll address the points in reverse order.

Thirdly (or first of all?), most yard sales have some nice stuff. Lots of them have exclusively nice stuff. A yard sale to the person who wrote that ad is a fat guy in a lawn chair next to a card table covered with old Hummels and dusty snowglobes and a pile of rotting stuffed animals on a tarp. You will find lots of name brands listed in the ads of yard sales, because name brands are mostly what people buy. Therefore, that's what most people have for sale. This ad tells me that the people hosting it have never ever been to an actual yard sale. And that tells me that their prices are going to be too high. I've been to yard sales with rotting stuffed animals, but I've also been to sales where they try to sell Gap sweaters for $5 apiece and Pier 1 end tables for $20. I'm going to walk away empty-handed either way. Of course, I'm not even going to this sale at all because they've started off our relationship by insulting my sub-culture. Hrmph.

Secondly, lots of sales are indoors. Really. I promise. In fact, "garage sales" by definition are indoors. Again: a glaring lack of sale experience.

And finally, let's talk about the crack of dawn. It's cute how they try to tell you that it's for your benefit. YOU don't need to get up early. It's so sweet of them to think of our beauty sleep needs. I'll see an ad about once a week for a sale with non-traditional hours. It indicates that the sellers are outside the yard sale culture, which we have already established in this case. But it also strikes me as kinda stupid. The people who go to yard sales are going to be up at the "crack of dawn," because that's when the sales are. They're not going to be out at 1 in the afternoon, because by then most sales are over. They're going to be at home on the futon, passed out from all the good deals. So the sellers have cut out a big chunk of their potential customer base right there. Then they are down to the people who don't usually go to yard sales. And that's fine, except that those people aren't reading the CraigsList garage sale ads. Of course, the sellers can put up signs, but if I see a yard sale sign at 2 pm, I would assume it was already over. Even if the time is written on the sign, I'm likely to dismiss it without consulting the time at all, because by then I'm ready to go home and hit the futon.

Hey, it's a free country, and people are, of course, more than welcome to try and get $5 for last year's sweaters any time they want. But they are going to miss out on a lot of traffic by having late hours. Or, they are going to have people pounding on their doors at 8 AM anyway.

I don't mind the early hours. Sure, I'd like to sleep in on Saturdays, but at the same time, you get your yard saling down and out of the way, and you've still got the rest of the day. You know, for napping on the futon.