Post-Sale Recap

Today was, as the Germans say, tote Hose - or dead trousers. In other words, nothin' doin'. I only made two sales in three and a half hours, though the last one was to a super-cute first grade teacher. She bought several owl pictures for her class. I wanted to take a picture of her with this matching owl set, but alas, she had a stalker and was therefore quite camera-shy. She also reordered much of my bad art because she claimed that she had OCD. So yeah, it was a weird way to end the sale. None of my neighbors participated today. For them, it's much easier. They've just got a few boxes of stuff. Me, I've got this much:


Hauling the LPs and 78s up and down the stairs is murder, so I have to be out at least a day to make it worthwhile. It really was this time around. Although the LPs sold poorly (who on earth wouldn't want to buy some John Davidson albums??), I did manage to sell off more than 10% of my 78s. I just have to sell another 650 of them and I'll be free!

Now everything goes back to where I got it. The books, CDs and LPs go upstairs to my apartment, the 78s go to downstairs storage and the bad art goes to the boiler room. Wanna see what didn't get snapped up? This:

This is the painting that the Real Change Mama from a few weeks ago claimed was a cat. It's pretty obviously a raccoon, right? Well, it didn't sell this time around either.

For some reason, at least half a dozen people saw fit to tell me how valuable they thought my LPs were. And most of them weren't crazy. It was odd; their whole line of reasoning was that my LPs were old. I couldn't argue with them there, but I introduced the concept of demand to them. None of these records was in demand. Nobody wanted them, so even though all of these titles were no longer being made, they were worth no more than a dollar apiece - just as the 78s, which were even older, were only worth 25 cents each. Even after this whole crash course in economics, one guy, a Real Change Papa, still wanted to buy up all my LPs. His whole plan was to put them on eBay. Yeah, very imaginative. The only thing he said that was standing in the way of taking them off my hands was his lack of a car. Yep, he was all talk. I knew that from the start.

Anyhow, unless I can rig up some kind of ingenious dumbwaiter-like system to get all these records to the sidewalk with a minimum of effort, this will be my last sidewalk sale of the year. By next year, I will have forgotten that each crate of 78s weighs a ton and that most people don't know what bad art is.