Everything Must Go!

What do you mean, “throw-away society?” Americans save their junk and then sell it in front of their garages – and earn billions in the process.

You can’t miss the signs; they’re written in fat magic marker on day-glo cardboard and hang from streetlights and traffic signs. Arrows show the direction to take for this scavenger hunt amidst the thicket of single-family homes. Take a right and there’s another sign: left here. At the corner, another “go left” sign and then you can already see the house where sofas and mattresses pop up between the front yard foliage.

An entire family sits on folding chairs in the driveway, having a sociable coffee break. The potpourri of years past lies in the front yard as if it were off-loaded by a dump truck, as if it landed there after a party that got a little too out of hand. There’s chipped dinnerware, VCRs, golf clubs, souvenirs of trips taken long ago, clothing, car-top carriers and battered stuffed animals. When a prospective customer eyes a brass lamp decorated with colorful glass beads, the flattered owner immediately jumps up (I always loved that lamp!). You can get a three-piece set of green Samsonite luggage from the 1950s for only ten dollars. In an attack of the crazies, you take all three pieces.

Garage sales, also often referred to as “yard sales,” are as American as garages themselves. In the United States, excess junk is stored not only in attics or basements (which many houses don’t have) but also in garages. There’s a 70-year-old retiree who wants to move from Massachusetts to live with his daughter in Texas and wants to sell all his possessions; the only problem is that he doesn’t have a garage. That’s why he sits in the entrance hall to his house wearing a brown camping hat with the front door wide open, taking four dollars for a white answering machine that’s as heavy as a telephone book. There’s a creaky old bedroom suite that might well date from the Eisenhower era. A package of lumpy scouring powder is available for fifty cents, as if supermarkets didn’t already flog the same thing for the same price.

The garage sale is proof that the popular notion Germans have of Americans throwing everything into the garbage is just plain wrong. Robert A. Emmons, who studies the phenomena of American culture, estimates there are some six to nine million garage sales a year across the United States that result in over $2 billion in sales. According to sociologist Juliet Schor, a professor at Boston College, consumption in America has doubled over the past 25 years and the garage sale has become a kind of back door for the ever-increasing desire for material goods. It is one of the many little wheels that keep the frantic circulation of goods going.

Even in those neighborhoods where the pre-fab houses all look just alike and where one suspects the word “junk” is frowned upon, garage sales are also hugely popular. A smorgasbord of seventies-style goods fills the driveway of one house that looks like a fake castle with all its little towers and alcoves. The owner, a hefty guy with a beard and “Hell’s Angels” and finger tattoos, can scarcely keep from regaling potential buyers with anecdotes about every item he’s selling, whether it is knight’s armor or TV-dinner plates. The industrial lighting that doesn’t come on unless you push the switch twice came from his father’s office.

The small-town atmosphere of this suburban bazaar reminds one of the rural setting in The Waltons television series; that good old America of the past. Activity picks up in streets that have been empty up to now. What the ice cream truck’s bell is to the kids, the garage sale signs are to the adults. No one has to fear that daddy will grab his gun to run off strangers trespassing on his property; everybody here today has been invited and is welcomed with open arms. Cars drive past at a crawl as if they were at a drive-in show; the displays are inspected from the open window and if they show little promise the cars drive on past.

What’s for sale is what the household no longer wants, from potato peelers to washing machines that buyers heave up onto the beds of their pickup trucks. Once in a while you might see a piece of Shaker-style furniture, a modern classic or a piece of Wedgwood porcelain that has been in the family for years. And of course there are tons of self-help books: “Up From Depression”; “What You Can Do about Your Phobias.”

Garage sales are a typical middle-class phenomenon. They sprang up in the 1950s along with the suburbs themselves at a time when consumption became a political matter. Your own house with dishwasher and television set became the national slogan of the American way of life: I shop, therefore I am. But sooner or later, even the biggest garage gets overcrowded and then it’s time to put price tags on the junk pile and set it out in the driveway.

You don’t need a city permit to have a garage sale; you can have a sale whenever you want and the season runs well into autumn. Some hardy souls even sit wrapped in blankets in winter, selling Christmas decorations, dusty angels and the ice skates their kids have outgrown.

In America, where the population is far more mobile than in other parts of the world, furnishings are often sold before the house. Americans are accustomed to starting over from square one. At the same time, there has been a boom in the self-storage business, those places that look like a whole neighborhood of little garages where, for a couple of hundred dollars a month, millions of families store whatever possessions they want to keep when they have no other place to park them. The financial crisis has taken away two pillars of the American way of life simultaneously–the dream house and consumption on credit–and has also made it hard to hang on to luxury items. Many American families have had to scale back and have found it easier to give up their most valuable things.

Some localities have found it necessary to impose restrictions on garage sales. The Mayor of Weymouth, Massachusetts limits each property owner to three sales a year because the steady stream of traffic to some houses was beginning to cause traffic jams.

The new spirit of the times in America seems to be “conspicuous cutting,” as they refer to it. It’s the opposite of the conspicuous consumption that had been the norm for the newly affluent. Instead of buying everything new, getting it from the secondhand shop works just as well. Many consumers have discovered the pleasure of showing off the new dress they just snagged at the Salvation Army store.

It remains to be seen whether America’s newly discovered modesty will stay around long enough to change the way Americans live. The fact that even eBay hasn’t succeeded in killing off the garage sale says a lot about mankind’s social potential. It has become tradition in many suburbs for families to get together for neighborhood garage sales that have developed into enjoyable garden or grill parties. It’s mostly toys and children’s clothing up for sale, and cakes, lemonade and cookies are served. At the end of the day, the people have not only increased their spending money and pared down their junk collection; they’ve also shared an enjoyable experience.