Why? Well, any retailer knows how expensive it is to set up a brick and mortar store. The lease payments. The taxes, the electric bill.
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| From Cockeyed.com, a rogue shoe store masquerading as a garage sale takes oer this Sacramento yard. |
In Sacramento, according to Consumerist, rogue retailers just pay homeowners some cash and pretend to set up a garage sale on their driveway.
Instead of that old coffee maker, the scuffed up old toys, the womens clothes that went out of style around 1986 and the floral pattern couch that never did match the orange shag carpeting, retailers just put their wares on somebody's driveway.
Citing Cockeyed.com, Consumerist laid out how this worked, at least in Sacramento.
According to Cockeyed, a pregnant woman offered a homeowner $25 if she could borrow their Sacramento yard for a garage sale.
The homeowner naive agreed, and soon, a box truck showed up and unloaded the entire contents of a shoe store on the hapless homeowners lawn.
The homeowner said she felt tricked, obviously, but was too scared to shut it down. She did agree to have a sale on her lawn, and she didn't want to argue with these sketchy shoe store entrepreneurs.
A sign spinner waved down traffic, cars snarled the once quiet neighborhood and it was chaos for an afternoon.
The impromptu store packed up and left at the end of the day, according to Cockeyed, but in a crime that may or may not be related to the rogue store, batteries were stolen from a couple cars in the neighborhood the next night.
To combat illegal "stores" masquerading as lawn sales, many communities limit the number of yard sales a person can have to one or a handful a year.
The people with the rogue stores know this, so they hop from place to place running these scams.
I wonder how many of the shoes for sale at this impromptu retail store were stolen from warehouses or other retailers.
So, if somebody comes up to your house and asks to borrow your property for a yard sale, do the Nancy Reagan and Just Say No.
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