Citywide garage sales days become a treasure hunt

About a dozen people searched through tables of merchandise and racks of gently used clothing at a Main Street garage sale in Clyde.

It was not the first time those racks had been sifted through — they once held new clothes at Wilson’s Clothing Store downtown.

“My grandma used to own a clothing shop, so we have her racks to put clothing on. That’s a great convenience,” said Maria Gerber, a Wilson family member.

Gerber and several of her relatives combined their merchandise into one big sale at the home of her grandmother, Virginia Wilson, as part of the citywide Clyde garage sales. Gerber said they were selling a lot.

“We’ve been doing really good. A lot of people came out,” the young woman said.

The Wilson family holds garage sales about every other year, and they’ve honed a technique to bring people back on multiple days — they offer coupons for a free item worth $5 or less with the purchase of another item. The coupons are only good on the last day of the sale.

“This is our big way to get people to come back to our sale. We usually have about 30 coupons come back, so that’s 60 extra items we get rid of,” Gerber said.

Dozens of homes all over Clyde hosted sales on July 23 to 25. Community Garage Sale Days have been held in Clyde for a couple of decades, traditionally held on the last weekend in July.

Sue Kincaid held a sale at her Warnecke Road home that featured mostly new merchandise.

“My daughter extreme-coupons. She takes care of her own, does a lot of donations to churches, and the rest she brings to me,” Kincaid said. “Most of my stuff is brand-new, and it’s cheaper than Goodwill.”

Kincaid sells much of her merchandise at flea markets, and business is so good that she traded her Realtor license for a vendor’s license.

“I don’t miss it at all,” she said of selling real estate. “People don’t call me at midnight, and deals don’t fall through.”

At a home on Lynber Road, customers bought items from a sale that was pulled together at the last minute. Alivia Danhoff, a Wittenberg University student, returned from an internship working with harbor seals in California on the evening of July 22 and immediately began gathering things for the sale.

“She stayed up all that night and all day yesterday to throw this sale together,” said her mother, Natalie Danhoff. “She didn’t make any money while she was doing the internship, and she needed money for college.”