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A Buyer’s Guide To Toronto Garage Sales
Photo by Nancy Paiva/Torontoist.
It’s mid-summer, and Toronto has entered high garage-sale season. If you’re still buying household goods, books, DVDs, video games, tools, or weird curios at full retail price, you’re being had. Now is the time of year to stop living at the mall and start living off the junk stream. Torontoist will tell you how.
Beginner:
The first thing you must know about garage sales is that they are the world’s greatest source of inexpensive stuff. Now you know.
Unfortunately, lots of other people are also aware of that, and so your first job is to beat all of them to the sales.
Garage-sale times vary from house to house, but in Toronto a majority start on Saturday morning, around 9:00 a.m. By 11:00 a.m. a lot of the good shit is gone. By 3:00 p.m. most sales are done for the day. Some continue on Sunday, but it’s pointless to go then unless you have some use for mismatched silverware or bird’s nests of cables for computer peripherals that their original owners threw out five years ago.
One way to optimize your garage sale time is by checking Craigslist on Friday night. Obsessives might consider making and following a Google Map of individual sales, but a less stressful way of going about it is to find a single large street- or neighbourhood-wide sale and start your day there. Afterward, with whatever time is left over, travel along the nearest arterial street and keep an eye out for signs. This is easiest on a bike.
But be careful: signs that are warped and dirty are probably leftovers from previous weekends. Don’t waste time looking for sales that aren’t there.
The best neighbourhoods for sales are ones where people own, rather than rent, their homes. You’re looking for places with rich veins of junk stored up in their basements and attics, and you just won’t find that, generally speaking, in the downtown core. The suburbs are always excellent, so if you can make it to North York or Etobicoke, that’s great—though you may need a car. For easier cycling, try High Park or the Junction in the west, or the Beach in the east.
Intermediate:
Getting the best deals from garage sales requires a certain mindset. Think of it like this:
People who hold garage sales are doing so not because they’re looking to make money, but because they’re looking to get rid of stuff they don’t want anymore. The only reason they aren’t throwing it away or dumping it on the loading dock of the nearest Value Village is that they loved it once. That food processor, those knockoff sunglasses, that Planet of the Apes VHS box set—all of those things were once useful to the seller, and helped define him or her in some minor way.
The point of the garage sale is to personally deliver those faded mementoes into appreciative hands. The money is important mainly as a token of that appreciation.
What this means is that prices are negotiable, often by a lot.
When you arrive at a sale, say hello, and then browse, picking up whatever you’re interested in (so nobody else grabs it first). Once your arms are full of stuff, decide what you want to pay for the lot. Then offer the owner half of that. Do it in the same tone of voice you used to say hello. Do this even if there are price tags. Price tags don’t apply to you.
Half the time your lowball offer will be accepted without question. If not, you’ve left yourself with plenty of bargaining room. If the lowest price the owner will agree to is higher than your imaginary number, just walk away. There’s plenty of secondhand junk in the world, and there’s no reason ever to overpay.
Advanced:
As your taste in junk refines and your shelves fill up with curios, you will start to become more and more selective. Where once you might have paid $20 for a Super Nintendo and a couple of games, you will find yourself offering $10 or even $5. True, the only place to put it would be on top of the other Super Nintendo, but you could always eBay it for $50, and that kind of profit isn’t at all bad for a morning’s work.
You’ll start to recognize faces as you go from sale to sale: vinyl collectors whose wives grudgingly allow them a room in the house to store their records; antiques resellers who go from home to home offering insulting prices for outlandish, dated furniture that they then resell to people who are decorating their condos, for thousands of dollars. Old cameras can be lucrative because there’s a favourable confluence of supply and demand: old photographers sometimes get rid of them and young photographers sometimes buy them because they want their photos to look old. There are some grizzled guys that go from sale to sale asking for jewelry, which they examine right there, in the garage or driveway, with a loupe.
You may eventually find yourself refusing to pay more for things than you’d pay for their weight in potatoes.
It is at this point that you should stop going to so many garage sales.