We just spent 5 hours selling a bunch of items today to people that drove by and saw our sign.  Craigslist did nothing as I asked the random few where they heard about our sale.  Not a knock against CL but just something I noticed.

The good news is we made 25 bucks.  The bad news is we wasted 5 hours doing it.  I can already hear my tax guy mentioning "donation" in the back of my head.  The fact is, we could have gotten more value out of donating than sitting around trying to sell our "junk".  This is especially so for California where the cost of living is so high.

We spent $15 on breakfast that we had to get from Mickey D's that morning.  We ate out on the yard while pitching our items to people.  In contrast, we could have woken up later, cooked a omelete and sat around our table like normal eating for free if we had donated.  The cost of doing that would have been someplace in $5.  The rest of our day would have been spent on packing.  Luckily around noon I noticed what a waste of effort the junk sale was having, so I went in to pack.  Contrast it to that if after breakfast at 8AM I had done the same.

Packing would be up to speed around noon or so and we could have gone to the marina.  Jackie or I would have drove over to the homeless shelter with TWO cars of stuff to donate.  We would have dropped it off and would have been free for the evening.  Instead, at 2PM we both started to pack.  We got it up to an acceptable level around dinner, but since we were packing we needed to go out to eat again, this time at Denny's.  30 bucks later (my Mom came) we got home and are bushed.  We pack some more and then watched some TV.  Again, we probably would have ate leftovers or cooked something up for around $5.  We lost money and time on the day.  Essentially we lost.

Jackie and I talked about it later and the funny thing was, I had come to this same conclusion in our last junk sale.  Writing this log will hopefully alleviate this problem again! Note to self: Donate biatch! :)