Honolulu Lite
Someone should publish ground rules for garage sales. We recently bought a piano at a garage sale, and frankly, it was a messy affair. Buying garage sale piano
ended on a sour note
Charles Memminger is on vacation. He left behind this "Classic Lite," which first ran on Oct. 6, 1996. It has been edited for space.
We had been looking for a used piano for ages. Prices seemed to range from $1.37 to $43,000. I don't know much about pianos. I know they are chiefly made up of a bunch of white keys with a gaggle of little black keys sprinkled haphazardly over the keyboard. When you poke at one of the keys, the piano emits a sound. This is called "music."
There are all kinds of pianos, but they all share one basic characteristic: They are extremely heavy and hard to move. There are upright pianos, not-so-upright pianos, pianos with shadowy pasts, grand pianos, baby grand pianos, fetus grand pianos and pianos with only visions of grandeur.
When you don't want a piano, several thousand of them will be for sale at dirt-cheap prices. When you actually want one, they are suddenly scarce. And the harder you look, the more expensive they become.
If you find a reasonably priced piano in the paper and call the number listed, you are met with derisive laughter, seeing as how the piano was sold 12 minutes after the paper hit the streets. Knowing this, when my wife and I saw a piano for sale in a recent newspaper for $500, we raced to the garage sale address so we could be first in line. It turned out we knew the wife of the family selling the piano. She introduced us to her husband, who had another couple on hand also interested in the piano. We entered the house, letting the other (older) couple go first out of courtesy.
As we looked at the piano, the older couple asked some serious piano-related questions. I quickly scanned the instrument. Yes, it seemed to have the requisite splatter of white and black keys.
"We'll take it!" I announced, favoring a pre-emptive strike. The other couple blanched. They claimed they had the right of first offer because they had entered the house first.
This was the closest we had come to having a shot at buying a piano, and I wasn't going to lose it on a vague technicality. Yes, I said, they had entered the house first because the threshold was not wide enough for all of us, and we were just being polite to our elders.
They insisted that garage sale etiquette held "first come, first served," and since they were first in the house, they had the right to make the first offer. I refused to budge. It was a standoff. I suggested we flip a coin, which the owners -- awkwardly caught in the middle of an escalating garage sale battle -- quickly agreed would be fair. The other couple grudgingly agreed.
I flipped the coin, and the old codgers (forget courtesy, this was war!) called it. They lost. In the driveway, feeling magnanimous, I apologized to the couple for the way things worked out. The wife was crying. The husband hissed, "You're only making it worse!" They climbed in their Mercedes and drove away.
I don't think we were wrong in how we handled the situation, but someone ought to put together some firm rules for garage sales. If that couple had been a few decades younger, I might have been in real trouble.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com