Freelance Retort: Tag Sales

Graphic By ArtJSan

by Brian Moloney

This seems to be tag sale season, everywhere I go.

Or if you prefer, garage sale season…I guess if there’s a garage involved.

Then there are flea markets.

Swap Meets.

I’m not quite sure what that is, but I think it might involve Mormons.

Craft Fairs.

Art Fairs.

I guess the latter two are a bit less annoying since they tend to take place in parks, school yards and church parking lots. And lots of their wares are pretty interesting. I can’t get enough of those bobbing chicken head things. Plus the sellers are usually real crafts people and artist who are trying to make a living, doing what they love to do.

Although I once overheard an “artist” telling a potential customer that he could re-do a landscape with more blue to better coordinate with the person’s living room drapes. No kidding….

But hey, I write about pharmaceutical sales tools, so who am I to talk.

Mostly it’s the tag sales I take issue with; especially if the issue takes place in my neighborhood.

You can always sense when these “events” are brewing, the same as a bad storm.

The first indicator is the “Tacker”.

About 3 or 4 days before, the “Tacker”.will appear on street corners, wherever there’s a telephone pole tacking up little notices announcing the place and time of the sale.

Then on the morning of the big day,the” Tacker” brings out even more signs, poster size in some case, with cute little arrows pointing the way…to your street

Which then leads to about 400 cars parked at the end of your driveway by noon.

It’s really quite a phenomenon.

Think about it. You spend years buying things, collecting things, storing things, and then one day you just decide you don’t want any of these things.

In the old days when this happened people would just put everything in boxes and take a trip to the dump.

Mostly, we called it garbage.

Today, you borrow a bunch of long tables and clothes racks from friends who have these items for some reason—I guess they got them at a tag sale—organize all your garbage in neat little displays with neat little price tags…and somebody will come and buy it.

Once I was mowing the lawn while one such event was taking place next door, stepped away for a minute, and when I came back…

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