Garage Sale: Hijacked!
Last month I organized our neighborhood’s annual block sale, which I “founded” seven years ago. Most of the years have gone extremely well, with this year being a noticeable exception. Our sale saw about one-fifth of the foot and auto traffic of previous years. We were all puzzled as to why this year was so dismally bad. So, of course, I did some investigation to discover the root cause.
Our street is fortunately hanging off the south side of a very busy street which gets a large amount of both morning and evening commuter traffic serving several local neighborhoods that range from the quite wealthy to low-income apartment dwellers. Plus, the intersection of our street and the busy thoroughfare is the main entrance for our entire large neighborhood of a couple hundred houses. Couldn’t be better designed to get traffic down our street when we want it.
As usual, I did everything by the book prior to the sale, using techniques I’d honed over the years to drive as much traffic down our street as possible on Garage Sale Day:
- Passed out flyers in the neighborhood three weeks in advance.
- Advertised on Craigslist four days prior.
- Put up large 18×24-inch neon-colored advertising signs two nights before the sale on all nearby major intersections, as well as smaller intersections serving two local schools and the supermarket just down the street.
- Parked the SUV out at the corner of the busy street during the evening commute the night before the sale, the SUV positioned so that two massive 36×24 neon green signs would have the highest visibility. (Remember last year’s sign in anticipation of Harry Potter Book Seven? The book arrived during the garage sale!)
- Checked that all the other signs were still up the night before the sale.
- Advertised on Craigslist, again, this time the night before.
Our Annual Block Sale generates a lot of excitement in the community, and oftentimes other houses on nearby streets participate. I welcome them to take advantage of our efforts, and everyone typically does quite well. Yet, once the limited traffic that actually showed up died down and I had a chance to canvas the neighborhood to do the meet-and-greets (as I do every year), I discovered that everyone else had the same poor results. Revenue for the neighborhood as a whole was only about one-third of previous years. What the hëll happened?!
And that’s when I found out we’d been hijacked.
Diverted garage sale traffic
Two adjacent houses on a nearby street in our neighborhood banded together and screwed everyone else. Many of our signs were removed or taped over with their own advertising signs, which wouldn’t really have been all that bad if traffic was still directed to the community at large.
However, these self-centered áššhølëš effectively and efficiently diverted at least 80% of the car traffic by taping up five large neon signs with huge black arrows (marked in red) pointing down side streets that lead directly to their houses. Unfortunately, because of the slight curve at the entrance to our street, the first thing incoming potential junk/treasure buyers now saw — instead of our houses (participants shown as green pins) — was the large directional signs and the streets down which they pointed, and they naturally followed the signs (the unsanctioned detours marked in blue) right to the miscreants (marked as purple pins). We didn’t stand a chance.
Next year, precautions will be made, especially during the early morning hours just prior to the sale:
- Make sure the intersections signs are still in place and highly visible.
- Half-hourly patrols to ensure proper signage and routing.
- Station a couple of teens at the intersection to dance around and direct traffic with large handheld arrows — like you see on the corners at malls, etc.
- Other visual aides such as streamers or balloons down the entire street.
Game on, jerks! You have no idea who you’re messing with.
You want to have your garage sale on the same day as the established annual garage sale event in the neighborhood? OK. Not a bad idea, actually, since you’re likely to benefit from the increased traffic that everyone in the neighborhood is looking to benefit from that day.
You want to put signs up directing traffic to your house? OK. Kinda expected. Room for everyone, and all that.
But to put put your signs OVER the other signs? To REMOVE the other signs.
And tell me, just what did that get you?
Amoung other things, they got at least ten pìššëd-off neighbors…
Richard, you have officially lost me as a reader. I have enjoyed your previous commentary about web related topics, but many of your posts just seem…sad lately. Take care, I’m off to remove this site from the RSS list.
ten pìššëd off neighbors
Yeah, that’s the main “what did it get you” I was thinking of. And, really, why pìšš them off? They might have made a bit more money by directing all traffic just to themselves than they would have made otherwise. But given the higher traffic in the whole neighborhood, I can’t imagine it would have been much. Enough to offset pìššìng off the rest of the neighborhood? That I can’t imagine.
@dugal: Thus the blog title. You were pre-warned! Well, thanks for stopping by as long as you did.