Outrageous Yard Sale Stories
A yard sales or swap meet is a type of bazaar where inexpensive or secondhand goods are sold or bartered. It may be indoors, such as in a warehouse or school gymnasium; or it may be outdoors, such as in a field or under a tent. The yard sales vendors may range from a family that is renting a table for the first time to sell a few unwanted household items to a commercial operation including a large variety of used merchandise, scouts who rove the region buying items for sale from garage sales and other yard saless, and several staff watching the stalls.
Many yard saless have food vendors who sell snacks and drinks to the patrons,and may be associated with carnivals or concerts.Some have become infamous as outlets for bootleg movies and music or knockoff brand clothing, accessories, or fragrances.
The origins of the term are disputed,but some have observed that buyers and sellers may be as active as yard sales or that the original people and goods were infested. According to Word and Phrase Origins, the term was derived from the "Vallie sales" of Manhattan.
The original yard sales may be the Marche' aux puces ("sales with yards" in French) of Saint-Ouen, Seine-Saint-Denis, in the northern suburbs of Paris. It is a large, long-established outdoor bazaar, one of four in Paris. From the late 17th century, the makeshift open-air sales in the town of Saint-Ouen began as temporary stalls and benches among the fields and sales gardens where ragpickers exchanged their findings for a small sum.
Some television shows focus on the appraisal of second hand goods often found at yard saless that are worth far more than the buyer paid. The most popular of these shows is Antiques Roadshow in the United Kingdom, which led to American, Canadian, Swedish and Dutch versions of the show.