Garage Sales

[Blueberry]

Welcome to my neighborhood just about every weekend

My neighborhood also has a tradition of "curb alerts" - putting stuff on the curb with a free sign. People have figured that out, and they troll the neighborhood. Some make a living off of it. It's a bit disturbing, really.

[colorisnt]

Blueberry,

People did that in my old neighborhood in Columbia because there are a lot of doctoral students who move in/out at odd times and you can find some nice things. I was disturbed when one of the people who came around blocked my parking lot entrance for 15 minutes. I took my sweet time getting in the car, honked, and then got out to explain to him that I was going to be late for work. He grudgingly moved. It was really inconsiderate.

I ride this route probably 20+ times a year for a light ride. Whenever I am home for a week or even a few days, I do it once. I've never really had an issue with cars like this before. Maybe the nice weather after days of intolerable heat just had people going crazy, but the female cyclist I met up with seemed to think it was definitely more common when their were tons of garage sales. Perhaps spurious correlation?

[Blueberry]

It's a very liberal neighborhood, and a university community - so I'm sure that's what's going on. I was pretty laissez faire about it (in fact, I think it's nice that things get passed on) - until they started stopping for stuff without a free sign (I had to stop them from taking stuff off my porch that I intended to keep), and petty crime (i.e., shed break-ins started happening). I don't know - the people trolling to re-sell just struck me as creepy. I now put lists of stuff on the neighborhood email list and ask people to email me.

[Wahine]

Agreed that drivers in general are pretty intolerant but I've also noticed an increase in poor driving amongst the garage sale goers. I was alarmed one week when a family go into a oversized pick-up that they had parked in the driveway of the yard sale, (making it hard for other people to get in to the sale), he backed out of the driveway nearly hitting me and proceeded 3 doors down to park in another driveway at the next sale. Ugh!!! I can't believe he didn't just park on the road and walk from one to the other. It was a multi household community sale and most people were driving to areas, parking and walking around. So not only did he almost hit me, he came way to close to other familys walking. There were little kids all over the place.

Rant over.