Yard sales can be pretty much put into four categories. There are those that want to sell everything they have that is totally useless and take the money and retire. Then, there’s the ones where they really don’t want to sell anything at all because things are priced higher than what you would have to pay new at Wal-Mart. The ones that I try to avoid like the plague are the “perpetual” yard sales – where they set up shop permanently. Those are the rip-offs. But the mother lode of all yard sales are the ones where they have one thing and one thing only on their mind – get rid of this junk.

Some go to yard sales looking for bargains – like collectors. Many go to hone their skills at “dickering”. Yard sale dickering is an art all unto itself and any educated idiot could write a book about the psychology of yard sale dickering.

In its simplest form, the owner of said junk knows how much he needs to get for a certain piece of invaluable trash – let’s say 50 cents. So he prices it at $2.00. Along comes the master of yard sale dickering and spies this worthless instrument and pretends he has no interest in it. That’s the first rule of dickering – don’t show interest. That means no drooling on the object and gasping for air also is a dead give away.

Eventually, the perspective owner of garbage, offers the “entrepreneur” $1.00 for the item at which time the owner, trying to act reluctant and that he is being taken advantage of, relinquishes his valuable to the sucker for twice what he wanted for it in the first place.

Where else on earth can two people have so much fun. Their real pleasure came in walking away feeling quite certain they had screwed the other person and for what?