Garage sales suck nowadays. It's all clothes and household items. My mom used to take me to tons of garage sales when I was little. I mean every weekend during the season, maybe 10 to 20 sales in a day. And I mean it was an orchestrated event, she would make an itinerary beforehand and we'd go to them in order of which was closest to the next. I loved looking at other people's junk, but it also set me up to be an antiques collector, because in those days, antiques and vintage items were commonplace - and CHEAP. Like, I could buy stuff on a child's allowance. Now there's ebay and craigslist and offerup. And people see some old crap and think they have a gold mine, so they don't sell them at sales (or really at all with the insane prices people come up with, lol). It's a damn shame.
Also my mom would NOT go to estate sales, because she hated going into other people's houses.
My dad would, on far fewer occasions, take me to the Maxwell street flea market. That was a much different experience as it was mostly just walking around looking at crap. More of a journey vs destination type of thing. And even in those days, antiques were rare. Most of it was new retail items like clothes and small appliances (probably a lot of it that 'fell off a truck'), and the odd random used junk. Of course I did find a few gems there, like my Cadillac upright that I've had since I was about 12.
I will still pop in to sales whenever I see them, and on rare occasion if I happen to hear of one with stuff I might like. A while back, I caught wind of an estate sale with a 1950's TV in a beautiful wood cabinet. I figured they'd have a lot of old stuff, but when I got there, the tv was literally the only thing I was interested in, but not for $80, or thereabouts (which was already a very reasonable price, but I wasn't that interested in the tv). I inquired if they would have half price on sunday, and the guy talked me into buying the tv right then and there for $40. So that was nice. TV is still on my workbench. Maybe halfway done. Those are long-lasting projects. Took me like 5 years on my last vintage tv set.
A few weeks ago, my friend suggested we go out to some far away suburb for an estate sale - tbh, not even sure why, he doesn't really like that kind of thing. I said ok, at least it would be a fun waste of time. All the prices were marked WAY too high on everything. I saw a Hoover Concept One and a little 1970s-ish GE canister vac (with pretty much all the attachments), each marked $50. And really, I wasn't very interested at any price. I found some nice vintage electronics junk and other bits and bobs, and asked the guy about the vacs, I didn't haggle at all, he said $5 each. In fact, the actual prices were all extremely reasonable for estate sales, let alone compared to the ridiculous price stickers. So now I have two vacs that I really didn't need or want lol.
