There may be no greater site on the Internet than eBay.
I mean, ESPN.com is pretty good. CNN.com has some good stuff. Weather.com can be useful. But when you want to turn trash into cash, those don’t do you any good.
A few weeks ago I was helping my mom clean out a closet in her basement. Our church was having a rummage sale and it seemed like the good excuse for getting a bunch of old crap out of that closet.
I wish I had a picture of the “before” state of the space, with 25 years of our childhood games and puzzles and other assorted random stuff piled in there. I was shocked at the number of games that actually had all of their pieces.
But key to making that day great for me was finding the boxes that contained our Game Gears. If you don’t recall, Game Gear was the handheld video game system made by Sega. I think there were three of them in our family and a host of games to go with them.
The stash of vintage games
Sometime last year my younger brother and I had dug them out and found they didn’t work all that well. So when it came time to clean out the closet, they were marked for the trash. I took the box of games all the way out to the trashcan outside before realizing that in 2010, there is someone in the world who will buy just about anything.
Thanks to eBay, I was able to find that person, and will soon have $18 for something I was perfectly willing to just throw away.
I'm also doing this with a lot of old stuff. There's a very fine line to be found between "gettin' some bucks" and "not worth my time." With my parents moving and having a move myself in the next couple of weeks… the line skewed very much toward the latter.
Want any autographed baseballs? Hurray bat-a-thon prizes!
I think if you're leaning towards the not-worth-it territory you could get creative with disposing the stuff…The next waiter/waitress lucky enough to serve you could end up with their very own Ken Griffey Jr. baseball as a tip.
Though if you're open to trades, I have a few dozen boxes of identical baseball cards left over from my HOYSB fund-raising efforts…
While the idea of being creative is neat, I feel I'm just giving people junk. If I were a waiter, I'd want $10 instead of a Hank Aaron baseball. I sold my Ken Griffey, Jr… It went for like $50 on eBay.
Today I lined about 20ft of curb with free stuff… It's amazing the things people will take. I also gave away some nice things (tools, PS2 games, lots of mint books, etc.), but I'm just so glad to get it out.
I had a garage sale once and threw in the carpet rake I used once. It was the first thing that sold. $1.
Haven't had much luck selling on eBay, but I sure do buy from them.