As recession lingers, garage sales boom

By Brian Eckhouse

Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2008 | 2 a.m.

A man grabs a few flannel button-down shirts and a Ralph Lauren jacket from a rack on Rosemary Montour’s driveway, then bolts past a table full of tall beer stems to haggle with her. He offers $10 for the goods she’s priced at $12, including $5 for the jacket.

She won’t budge.

“That’s a new jacket,” the 67-year-old exclaims. “No!”

The incorrigible man appeals to her son. Still, Montour doesn’t bend. She can’t afford to.

Not when her husband, an ironworker, is making $500 to $700 less a week than at the height of the building boom. Not when her 29-year-old son lost his job as a New York-based flight attendant and had to move in with her. Not when the mortgage on the home they were renting was foreclosed last month, forcing them to move their belongings with just a few days’ notice.

Rent costs Montour and her family $1,500 a month for the small two-story tract house they now rent within a mile of Pebble and Bermuda roads. They have no 401(k). They’re trying to drive less and carpool more.

Every dollar counts. Montour has sold cans of food for 50 cents. Her family is peddling fishing rods, toolboxes and cheap jewelry.

“You hustle it, get rid of what you don’t need and move on,” says her 44-year-old son, Tim Wenger.

That’s an increasingly familiar mantra throughout the Las Vegas Valley.

The neighborhood garage sale — those weekend traditions to clean out the garage and make some extra money for the holidays — have now become economic necessities for a growing number of families.

This past weekend, at least a dozen garage sales were held within a three-mile radius of Pebble and Bermuda. And most were prompted by the need for money — not money for play, but money to pay the bills.

• • •

The Lux family is doing business in their late grandmother’s orange, terra-cotta-tiled living room, selling her heirlooms and some of their own collectibles. It’s more than an estate sale. It’s part of the family’s struggle to make the mortgage on her house, a converted barn with a pitched green roof, so they can keep it in the family.

It’s the third consecutive weekend they’ve opened the home for strangers to come inside, nose around, and buy family things that are worth more now for cash than for sentimentality.

“Whenever you have to give up things it’s sad, but it’s to sustain the house,” rationalizes Sean Lux, 27.

Had his grandmother died three years ago, when the economy was strong, and not last year, it’s unlikely the Luxes would be peddling her Tiffany-style lamp and her treasured 1930s-era ironing machine, ticketed at $220.

But business at the family-owned company, which sells chemicals, has dropped 27 percent over two years ago, with no hope for a quick reversal.

“I work on commission,” says Sean Lux, explaining why he can’t afford his own $2,200-a-month mortgage plus his share of his grandmother’s $5,200 monthly payment.

Old casino chips from the Barcelona and casinos in the South are stacked in plastic bags on rectangular tables in the small entranceway. Most are available for $5 or $10. Outside, a 1990 Sportster motorcycle is tagged at $3,300.

Among the shoppers: the Silva family, which has scoured yard and estate sales in recent weeks for deals. They settle on a single speaker for $140. Stacy Lux, Sean’s wife, puts the money in a fanny pack around her waist. By day’s end, it’s stuffed with $600.

• • •

Melissa Brown, a mother of two young children, is in worse financial straits but is selling far fewer items than the Lux family. Children’s clothes dangle from ropes just inside the garage of her home. A used bird cage sits a few feet from the garage doors, behind the children’s sneakers stacked down much of the driveway.

The promise of this yard sale is mere pocket change. But Brown needs a lot more. She and her husband have no money stashed away. The bar where she works cut two days from her schedule, and tips — her livelihood — are down. “Thank goodness people still want to party,” the 37-year-old says. “It is still Vegas.”

Her husband had worked two jobs, but recently lost one: his bartending gig.

So the ability to pay their next $3,000 mortgage bill rests on how much money she amasses in tips this week. “I try not to stress,” Brown says, cracking a nervous smile. “I’m a good worker.”

It’s prime time for garage-sale shopping: 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning.

But there are no shoppers in sight.

• • •

Linda Flower is selling brass candle holders and porcelain pieces on her driveway in the hope of getting “some loose change.” She and her husband can afford the mortgage, but it’s the escalating price of orange juice, milk and — until recently — gas that has them worried.

They owe $4,000 on a $6,000 hospital bill stemming from her husband’s anxiety attack initially thought to be a heart attack. Flower, a stay-at-home mom, watches after her 14-year-old stepdaughter and often her three grandchildren. The three of them greatly rely on her financially.

Linda had to tell her husband they couldn’t afford his annual fishing trip. “I don’t want to tell him that again,” she says.

Flower sells some gold this Saturday, reaping $280 toward his fishing trip.