Identify What Garage Sale Items Have No Resale Value

Series Summary

One man's trash is another man's treasure. So the saying goes. Sure, when mom takes her son's comic collection to the thrift store because she's remodeling his room, a lucky customer will hit the jackpot while the son will be heartbroken when he comes home for Christmas break. But this is a special case of a prize collection involuntarily changing hands. For everything that gets thrown out, can there possibly be someone anxiously waiting to get their hands on it? Of course not. In many cases, junk really is junk, in spite of what you may think after watching all those television shows on antiquing.

In this series of thrift shopping and antiquing videos, our antique store owner tells you what items NOT to buy next time you go to a garage sale. No one wants those Avon bottles, beer steins or wicker elephants; that's why they are still sitting in the yard hours after all the good stuff disappeared. Don't bother buying the Czech vases and Disney figurines expecting to get rich, because you will eventually be selling them as part of your own garage sale...

Video Transcript

"Hi, welcome to Expert Village! My name is Jan. Today we're going to learn some really great stuff about antiquing. I'm what you call a fun antiquer. I have a lot of fun. I was a college administrator, I actually have a PHD, but I decided to give all that up...boring! What I decided to do is go into antiquing, I'm a certified antique appraiser and I also have a wonderful antique mall in Pamona called Antique Avenue. We have an incredible number of strange things and we're going to look at a lot of them today. Today we're going to cover all kinds of interesting things about garage sales. Actually we're going to cover what we don't want you to buy at garage sales because I find that many people go to garage sales and they buy things and think they're worth a whole bunch of money because they watch the Antique Roadshow and they think "Oh, there it is, I saw it on the Antique Roadshow", or "there it is, it has Micky Mouse on it!" They think it's worth a lot of money, but WRONG! Remember Beanie Babies? We're going to look at some of those. There are some things out there that everybody sees at every garage sale. You know what they are and we're going to cover them today and I want you to pay attention so if you buy them, you're going to end up having your own garage sale, or end up putting them in a thrift store donation bin! You don't want to waste your money like that. The only thing good about it is that you may have a gift exchange, like an elephant gift exchange at work. That's about the only thing you can use them for. But you still want something interesting with a little class, something vintage, not something you can find just anywhere. So today, we're going to look at trash at your favorite garage sales and what not to buy called garage sale losers!"