Garage Sale Trail: National Garage Sale Day in Australia

What with Mrs Bobinoz hoppity hopping around with her broken leg, we didn’t get out and about much at the weekend. This probably explains why I only saw one garage sale sign. You know the sort of thing, handwritten, tied to a lamppost, “Garage Sale: Saturday starts 6 AM, 47 Koala Street.”

Had we gone out and travelled a bit, I might have seen more signs for garage sales, after all, Saturday 26 October 2013 was Australia’s national garage sale day, known as the Garage Sale Trail.

Garage Sale TrailThis event completely slipped by me, I only read about it online in the news after the all those garage doors had finally been shut.

It was only a year ago that I told you everything I knew about buying second-hand stuff here in a post called Car Boot Sales in Australia. That one covered garage sales, car boot sales and even the suitcase rummage market.

At the time though, I’d never heard of the…

Garage Sale Trail

What is it?

It’s a neat idea really, and it all started in 2010 in the Sydney suburb of Bondi with 126 garage sales taking place on the day. Since then it’s gone national and it’s grown. The figures are…

  • 2011 – 1613 garage sales
  • 2012 – 7732 garage sales

This year, 2013, I believe the plan was to go global, so did you have a Garage Sale Trail where you live? Here’s what I had where I live…

312 salesYes, on the website garagesaletrail.com.au there is an interactive map where you can find the garage sales near where you live. I searched for all garage sales within 20 kilometres of my house and came up with 312. Four of these garage sales were in my immediate area and less than a couple of kilometres away.

The map also told me that in Brisbane there were 968 garage sales going on in total. On the downside though, nationally it didn’t appear as though they had improved on the total garage sales of 2012, so maybe going global is a bit ambitious.

I still think it’s a neat idea though, as they say…

  • Sustainability: stuff gets redistributed instead of going to landfill
  • Community: a great chance to meet your neighbours
  • Making money: well, you would have only thrown the old stuff away
  • Charity: you could donate your takings (or some of them) to charity
  • Bargains: and of course, for buyers there are bargains

So, whether the Garage Sale Trail continues to grow or not will probably be best answered next year, but here’s what ABC News were saying about it last year…

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{ 6 comments… add one }
  • Tim November 6, 2013, 5:16 pm |
    • BobinOz November 7, 2013, 12:08 am |

      Ha ha, brilliant, yes it does bring it all back. Is there anything that YouTube doesn’t have?

  • Tim November 5, 2013, 7:05 pm |

    Fantastic! We will look out for this next year for sure. I have about a million books that I could do with getting rid of for a start…

    • BobinOz November 6, 2013, 4:07 pm |

      Crikey, that’s a lot of books. You must have a copy of Fly Fishing by JR Hartley 🙂

      • Tim November 6, 2013, 4:30 pm |

        Haha! A joke completely lost on our Australian friends! 🙂

        • BobinOz November 6, 2013, 4:54 pm |

          Unless they Google it 🙂

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