Career Aptitude

We finally got to hold the much delayed garage sale today. This thing has been scheduled and rescheduled more times than I can count starting back in May. It wasn't as good as it could have been and I owe that to the damp/windy conditions that started the early morning. Our brightly colored signs kept blowing off the utility poles we attached them to. We'd discover the lack of advertising, retrieve the damp wimpy posterboard and re-hang. A small rush of activity would follow. Then nothing - signs must be down again.

I had mostly baby stuff to sell. . . and I sold not a single piece of it. Well wait, I did sell one pair of Meg's old shoes for some woman's doll and I did sell a bunch of kid toys. But the 80 outfits a friend and I spent hours stuffing into ziploc bags and labeling are still in the bins we had dumped them into just minutes shy of midnight.

That said, I pocketed $60. I sold off the 6 pieces of furniture I had wanted to rid my basement of (one set and one beat up dresser), I sold the old dusty collecting sewing machine that had been banished once I got my "really cool quilt-friendly" machine several years ago. This gets added to the $40 I made selling some of our things at my parents neighborhood garage sale a month ago.

My mom sold off a bit of her stuff - a grand total of $18.

It was Logan who actually raked in the bucks in relative terms. The little hustler made a grand total of $8 selling apple cider, cookies and brownies he made. Seriously, he made them. I was a mere assistant -- a sous chef, if you will. He sat at his Little Tykes picnic table with his cups, cider and baked goods. We had put each individual cookie and brownie in a small ziploc bag.

"How much are those cookies?" asked his first customer (aka Grandma).

"25 dollars," said Logan, not willing to negoiate. We talked him into going with cents. He told his next customer the cookies were 35 cents. Grandma told her they were 10cts. The lady paid of 25.

We hit one of those slow streaks, not yet having identified the trick of the missing signs. Logan saw the man reading the electric meters walking down the street. He yelled out to the guy from his story-reading perch on our front steps. "Hey! You should be a customer!"

The guy turned and laughed and then said "Hey? Is that wicker furniture?"

The next set of people to visit our 'store' of odds and ends didn't get passed the driveway apron before Logan was making his pitch. "Hi! You want to buy these cookies? How about my cider? It's good!"

If they got by him with out treats in their hands, he'd run up and down the display of items making suggestions of things they might like. "What about this? I think you would like stroller!" he says to the old man with no apparent need for a stroller.

People out for an afternoon walk would hear from Logan. "Hey! You should come see my garage sale!" People walking up our neighbor's driveway got pitched for cookie sales. He was relentless. And in the end, he was successful.

It occurred to me that he's got a talent. He'll either grow up to take over the Marketing Great mantle from moi, or he'll join the bane of my existence - the sales department.