Great American Pastimes: The Yard Sale

The yard sale is a quaint american custom, designed to fill your 4-car garage with junk. (Ever wonder why Americans park their cars in their driveways when they have a perfectly good garage? It is because the garage is full of the family's excess possessions.)

Eventually the junk reaches its limit. And someone says, "we have to clear out all this junk. let's have a yard sale!" People post signs on telephone poles and get up bright and early to sit on a lawn chair and argue with strangers over the value of their old CDs and rusty bikes and very used baby items. The proud buyer, after haggling down the price of an old chemistry textbook from 1 dollar to 50 cents, takes it home and the cycle begins anew. The yard sale is an essential element of this process of moving garbage from one family to the next.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Every object has a life cycle and part of that life cycle involves the dump.

I got very excited about the flea markets in Spain like El Rastro in Madrid or El Mercadillo del Jueves in Sevilla. However, El Andaluz explained many of the items for sale were, essentially, garbage that people had fished out of the trash. So, while it is interesting to browse, I would never buy things there. Mainly because i would not know where to store it in my tiny Spanish flat.