Driveway Hustlers

Open your garage for the Barbie doll collector

By Corey Levitan

I collect Barbie dolls. I’m not confessing a sexual fetish. This is something even more humiliating … I do it for a living. I guess I have to admit it’s a living, since it now pays me more than journalism does.

Every Saturday at 7 a.m. for the past year, I have scoured Las Vegas garage sales for new inventory. My kitchen, dining room and bedroom are waist-deep in pink boxes my wife trips over and my year-old daughter is beginning to get suspicious about.

My rags are Barbies and my street corner is eBay, but the job is essentially the same one my great-grandpa Sam was forced to do after arriving at Ellis Island as an unskilled Polish laborer. I am a schmatta man. I have regressed the success of my family backward one full century.

My hunt usually begins in Sun City. Senior citizens know exactly what they paid for everything between 1947 and 1970. But what most don’t know is that their 1970 Julia Twist & Turn Barbie is now worth $350.

I don’t know this, either – off the top of my head. But I come armed with an iPhone scanner app that tells me the eBay asking price of any box with a bar code. (If my host asks what I’m doing, I’ll pretend to be photographing each doll to ask my wife if she wants it. Otherwise, my secret would be exposed and they would ask to see how much the dolls are worth. I never claimed not to be evil.)

The recession has elevated garbage-picking into a self-sustaining American economy, one glorified by reality shows such as “Storage Wars,” “American Pickers,” “Pawn Stars” and “Auction Kings.” More than 1.3 million people reportedly earn a living off eBay profits alone, adding nothing to the gross national product other than a markup.

I chose vintage Barbies because they’re compact, lightweight and sell quickly.

I am a grown man, by the way. As a Barbie collector, I find it necessary to remind myself often of this fact.

Unfortunately, people selling vintage Barbies for a song are the exception to the rule. More often, I find people who leave the “B” out of their “GARBAGE SALE” sign.

“Make me an offer!” they’ll say, as I thank them and take a pass on their half-used bottles of saline and toilet paper thrift packs with one roll missing.

Other times, I’ll find items that are valuable only to those who don’t mind the pesky risk of jail time. These have included (no lie) an AC-566 assault rifle with the serial number scratched off, an unlabeled vial of white powder and a fully functioning automated teller machine.

Oh, you mean those items in the back, officer? I just bought them at a garage sale. (Believe me, it’s tempting. At least selling drugs and stolen money and guns would be a real man’s job.)

Mostly, though, my humiliating new career is well worth the loss of a Saturday morning for me and my partner.

That’s right. I have a partner. Why does one need a partner on doll hunts? One doesn’t. So don’t make the same mistake I did. Gary started out as a friend I invited along for company. After receiving six months of extensive, unintentional training in how to buy dolls low and sell them high, Gary announced he was now my fully qualified online competitor and my profits would now be halved.

Every Saturday morning, Gary and I pull up to the same sales and rush toward the same dolls. I’m faster on my feet, since Gary is 15 years older and has arthritis. However, my Frankenstein is superior to his creator in every other way. Gary combines all of my knowledge with a skill for chiseling unprecedented in the First World. He will find a doll worth $100 that is on sale for $5, then offer $3 for it.

“It’s not even worth that much,” he’ll say through his best poker face.

Garage-saling with Gary is often painful. But garage-saling without him is worse. On the rare Saturdays that we compete separately, we invariably lie to each other that we “didn’t find much,” while secretly dreading that the other guy has found what one British businessman did in 2010.

Andy Fields paid $25 for five paintings to a Las Vegas man whose late aunt cared for the young Andy Warhol. Hidden in the frames of one of the paintings was a Warhol drawing, made when the pop artist was 10 years old. It’s expected to fetch $2 million at auction.

Here are two thoughts every Las Vegas garage-saler has had since that news broke: 1) Why couldn’t it have been me who bought that particular painting at that particular sale? 2) Thank God it wasn’t me who sold it.

News of the Warhol sale increased the number of garage-salers two-fold, and the viciousness of the competition five-fold. Last month, Gary and I pulled up to a sale whose craigslist ad promised mint-condition 1977 “Star Wars” action figures for $10 each, less than 1/10th of their value. Although we were 15 minutes early, five competitors had beaten us to the sale and already formed a nerd line in the driveway, as though Comic-Con were about to open.

When a lady in a bathrobe and curlers exited the front door to explain she wasn’t having a sale and didn’t know what we were talking about, the scam became apparent. The listing was a fake – probably planted by another nerd who had beaten all of us to another collectible sale on the opposite side of town.

By far the worst thing about my new line of work, however, is getting recognized. As much as I keep my head low, it happens at least twice a Saturday.

“Aren’t you that newspaper guy?” I’ll get asked.

These days, I’ll usually answer that, no, I’m not him, “but I get that all the time.” (I imagine Gary Coleman said the same thing when he worked as a security guard.)

I mean, as much as I want to stand there and discuss exactly how my burgeoning journalism career devolved into inquiring about the price of your Barbie Glam Vacation House, there is no time. Gary and I can only visit about 20 sales before 10 a.m., when everything worthwhile is gone. And stopping to converse puts me behind Gary.

But I’m catching up at my own pace. Last Saturday, I found a Barbie worth $58 that was marked $5.

The Sun City resident gladly accepted my offer of $3.

 

Four Noble Garage Sale Truths

In my year of professional garage-saling, the following truths have emerged as universal. I’ll pass them on and save you some headaches.

1. The word “HUGE” on a garage sale sign means tiny. The bigger the word is written, the tinier the sale is.
2. In a craigslist or newspaper ad, “something for everyone” means “nothing for anyone.” If this were not the case, the most desirable items for sale would have been specified.
3. “Estate sale” means “professionals-are-running-this-so-everything-valuable-has-already-been-sold-but-you’re-welcome-to-grandma’s-broken-plates-and-books-about-how-to-master-gin-rummy” sale.
4. Young children running around the driveway means don’t bother stopping your car. They have unwrapped, used, dropped, chewed and vomited on anything you possibly could have hoped to resell.