My local community newspaper is called the Knox Leader. Today its headline article was:

Garage Sale a Horror

Hagglers Stampede Home

by Michael Gleeson

'Middle-aged bargain hunters caused carnage at a Knox garage sale to raise money for charity.

A shocked and intimidated Ferntree Gully resident said buyers, who she believed were professional dealers, forced their way in before the garage sale started, broke items in the stampede and ruthlessly haggled to reduce the price of 25-cent items even further.

Worst of all was when they aggressively haggled with her 15-year old son to slash the price of his 100 collector cards from around $20 to $2, she said......

.....She told Leader bargain hunters arrived early and refused to wait for her husband to take stuff out to the carport. She said 10 people in their 50s and 60s forced their way into the tiny storage area, inadvertently smashing a number of items in the stampede.'

(Source and full story in the Knox Leader, Tuesday, September 2, 2008)


I never wake up early enough to get to garage sales early, and the few I've been to have little left. I would be interested to know if anyone relates to this or has any similar experiences!!!!  

I have seen this behavior. People, who assume their going to be finding some sort of Roadhouse antique, will rush in and try to snap up everything they can, but they never like the price -- even if its given away: they want to haggle, seduce, and rip you off. They know there's only two options here, on why you're selling:

1) you're so wealthy you've bought too much and have to ditch the stuff (why you can't just throw it away, I don't know...)

2) you're poor and need to get some cash quick

and neither of them is anti-greed. Same way with many reseller types -- buy for nothing, mark up the price to thousands times more expensive.

Luckily, this doesn't happen too often with RPG books, though, I see, there's at least two who are like it.

HermitFromPluto wrote:Here's a hypothetical:

Just say you go to garage sale and about 20m away you spy a brown box with Dungeons and Dragons on the front! Then you look across the yard and about 10 m away from you and also 20m from the box is another collector (the one who someone said stuck up notices all around town 'I buy used RPG books'). Between you and the box is another row of tables covered in glassware. What do you do?  

Run for it

Tell the seller what it's real value was and then walk away and watch the fly-er poster go nuts..

Mercenary_Roadie wrote:Tell the seller what it's real value was and then walk away and watch the fly-er poster go nuts..

This doesn't always work, I was at a game show quite some time ago and a guy was selling all his leftover Planescape stuff (other stuff as well)from his comic store.  He had 3-5 copies of Blood War, Conflict, Law, Planewalkers handbook etc.  All of it was Mint or Shrink.  I bought one of each for 50% off of cover price  and told him that he consider selling the rest on Ebay and would be surprised at the value; he thanked me and off I went.

The next day I returned to his booth to find the discounts were even better now (IIRC about 75% off).  He still had lots of stuff so I just bought it all and sold it on Ebay myself.

Some people are just dense or to lazy to make it work