According to The New York Times’ dialect quiz, the words tag sale, yard sale, garage sale, stoop sale, jumble, car boot, and patio sale all mean “a sale of unwanted item” on your porch or in your yard. Whatever you call it, it’s long been a popular method for getting rid of household clutter. One man’s busted blender being another’s tinkering project and all.
Yet if all you want to ditch is that blender, it’s not much of a sale (jumble, whatever). To facilitate the process of getting rid of unwanted items, you can try the Gone! app (for iOS). You download it, take a picture of your stuff, and write a description. Gone sets the sell price, lists it on marketplaces, and hopefully finds you a buyer. You receive a box and shipping label from Gone, who can help you schedule a UPS pickup. If no one wants your junk, it’ll donate it to a charity for you.
Gone has been around since June 2014, and it just acquired Yardsale Inc, according to TechCrunch. That app helped users find local people who wanted to buy their stuff, but its founders, Ed McManus and Ryan Mickle, shut it down in favor of putting their efforts behind Fobo, an electronics-auction that promised to sell your gear in 97 minutes or buy it from you if that failed.
Gone isn’t the only place trying to simplify selling items and make the experience more pleasant than Craigslist. Close5 (for iOS and Android) focuses on a safety, letting sellers and buyers meet in a public place. OfferUp (for iOS and Android) is sort of like a local swap meet; head over to the site or use the app to get a screen full of items in your city, from PS3 games to mixers to baby clothes. Even the thrift store concept has gone online with thredUP (for iOS and Android). It recently partnered with Target to let users trade used clothes for gift cards. If you prefer to do things the semi-old-fashioned way, GSALR (for iOS and Android) will help you find garage and estate sales in your area. (I’ll assume one I found in Portland advertising “house items, kids” is selling the kids’ stuff and not the children themselves.)
- 1. Close5
- 2. GSALR
- 3. Freecycle
One last option is Freecycle (for iOS and Android), which connects people hoping to get and give away stuff for no cost. Maybe there’s a better way to deal with that broken blender than the landfill after all.
