I've spent a few days going in circles wondering which, of several possible starting points, I'd pick for my first bit of writing here. The posts tagged "Nostalgia List" are about things I've seen that future generations probably will not experience, or if they do it will be such a different experience as to be almost entirely different except in name.
Let's talk about yard sales, which I'd argue probably died in the early 2000s. When I was young (let's say 1983-1991 or so) yard sales were something even the neighborhood kids would be interested in checking out.
What exactly IS a yard sale? I'd crack a joke here about selling square feet of the yard, but that's a joke that's been done to death; I've personally asked it when I was ten years old, "How much of the yard is for sale?" Well, humans have a unique habit of picking up a lot of stuff over their lifespan. Sometimes (okay, often) some of this stuff will have served its purpose or otherwise ended up not being used, then gets filed away in a drawer or box with a lot of other stuff that has also hit the end of usefulness.
Seasonal cleaning 1 comes along and all of that unneeded stuff gets gathered up for resale; get a bit of cash out of something you no longer need and clear up the space it was taking.
The difference between a yard sale and something like E bay was the randomness. For someone like myself, who had a deep interest in technology in general, a yard sale was like pulling the arm on a slot machine. More often than not, you'd come out disappointed that nothing interesting showed up at the yard sale. However, sometimes you'd win big-- a couple of Atari 2600 cartridges here, an older 12" black and white TV, some cassette or disk software for a random computer you may not even have, or something truly unique like a Coleco tabletop Pac-Man!
Because people were trying to just get rid of these items, it wouldn't be unusual to see things like the aforementioned Pac-Man going for $3.00 USD, or the Atari cartridges going for $1 each. While the internet has made communications a lot better, one thing I'd argue has had an equal negative is that now everyone is hyper-aware of the "actual" value of their possessions and much more prone to trying to wring every possible cent out of it on E-Bay or other auction sites.
Even Goodwill can no longer be really considered a place to find magical rare surprises; I've been told that they, too, have started to separate some stuff out for online-only sales.
There was a regular flea market where I grew up, which is basically a larger scale yard sale where people would bring in much larger loads of various used things for resale. The location that flea market was held at was converted to a Walmart about 25 years ago now, but I don't doubt that E-Bay would have killed it off if it still existed.
It's all just another relic of an era gone by.
1 Why do I call it seasonal cleaning instead of spring cleaning? Good question! Where I grew up, there were a lot of transient residents who would come down for just the winter to escape the snow. This would double or triple the population for those times. As a result, it made more sense for the locals to do their clean-up and yard sales in the fall or winter instead of spring.
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