NEW WAY TO PLAN A YARD SALE

The Old Days

Once upon a time, in a land very, very close to where you are right now (actually the same land - we just wanted to write it this way for the dramatic effect), those who wanted to plan a garage sale did not have any choice but to make all of the supplies they needed themselves.

These poor souls sometimes spent hours and hours toiling over painting their signs on tiny pieces of scrap cardboard or paper. They worked their fingers to the bone by writing all their price labels by hand on torn-off pieces of masking tape (cue the somber violin music). Hearts were wrenched in anguish as the dark storm clouds inevitably rolled in right after they set all their signs up, reducing them to useless mush that no one could read. Their misery could be felt by all.

Multi-family sales were difficult to manage as the masking tape only came in a light tan color. Color-coding price labels was out of reach for these deprived generations. Untold hours would be wasted by customers fumbling through each clothing label to find just the size they need, only to come up empty-handed.

A Flicker of Hope

As the years went by, a flicker of hope emerged as new developments occurred (cue hesitantly excited music). Pre-printed signs and price labels began appearing in the local markets! Is this what we had been waiting for? Could it be that an end to our misery had finally come? Alas, these hopes were quickly snuffed out (get the somber music playing again) as the shortfalls of these advances became apparent.

The problem was that these products had to be made in a one-size-fits-all fashion in order to be ready to sit on a local merchant's shelf. Unfortunately, every garage sale was (and continues to be) unique.

Items at each sale would be valued at different amounts and needed a different set of prices printed on the labels. Stuck with the price denominations chosen by someone who did not know their needs, sale planners everywhere were forced to buy extra price label sets just to get the few specific prices they needed for a sale. Sadly, the price labels not chosen for the sale would be discarded - abandoned and unloved (said with a wistful stare into the distance).

Confusion would set in as the sale planners would not easily know how many of each price denomination they had left. They would have to flip through page after page of tiny identical sheets to see if by chance one, just one of them, could possibly still have a 25 cent price label on it that they desperately needed for their precious little tea cup.

The agony that would sweep over their faces was nearly unbearable as they realized that they could only invite one other neighbor to join their sale since the price labels were only available in two colors.

Each sale would also be held at a different location and time. This required the purchasers of the store-bought signs to still spend significant time writing most of the key information themselves, nearly defeating the benefit of purchasing the sign in the first place. The space alloted for this information was usually inadequate, resulting in unreadable words and lost customers. Having these items custom-printed for an individual sale was prohibitively expensive with the high set-up fees and minimum order requirements (hey, someone had to pay Johannes Gutenberg for spending all that time pushing his movable type around between each job!).