The Tag Sale of Doom, Haggling for Nickles, and I just had the sh*t kicked out of me

Well, our big epic tag sale is done with, and I have my garage back. I've been bitching about this for a while, but now that it's over this is the last you'll hear of it for a while.

The tag sale is a fund raiser for a local animal rescue that rescues dogs from various pounds and animal control centers in the state that kill animals after often as little as ten days. We're 100% volunteer based, and we only have a small facility for about ten dogs at a time, so funds are always tight. These big donation based tag sales are pretty much our best money maker.

So this crazy tag sale went on for two days, in my front yard, with my wife, myself, and several other volunteers helping to run the whole thing. Now, I could go on about all the junk we had and how much stuff there was, but I can sum it up in one quick sentence: We sold four thousand dollars worth of junk. FOUR THOUSAND. Keep in mind that a lot of the junk we had we were selling for fifty cents or a buck, and people were making extra little donations here and there for different stuff to help our group out, but at the least 3700 of that came from sales.

That is a truly staggering amount of stuff. And there was hardly an item we sold that I hadn't moved at least once or twice.

So what I'm trying to say is that I hurt all over, as if I had been in a bad bar fight or spent a weekend running for my life from angry bears. But it was for a good cause, and everything went really well. Or rather, it mostly went really well...

Occasionally I come across people, mainly online, who bitch and moan about animal rescue stuff, and how we shouldn't waste one cent on animals when there are people in need. But this tag sale illustrated to me exactly why I prefer doing charity work for animal oriented organization instead of thing for people. Now don't get me wrong; I donate to humanitarian causes as well, but the majority of what I do for charity work is for animals.

On the second day of the tag sale a guy shows up with his wife, and starts haggling like crazy for every item. Haggling is an interesting cultural phenomenon I've noticed, in that Americans really don't do it. We're just not into it, and it comes across as rude and cheap to most average Americans. I don't know why, that's just sort of how things go. I don't know why Icelanders are insulted by tipping or why other countries think you're a sucker for not haggling over stuff, it's just how the cultures evolved. But anyway, this dude was an immigrant from either Haiti or some French speaking African country, and he was all about haggling.

Well, sort of.

I'm the guy that usually winds up haggling during our tag sale events. I'm not really a people person, but I can certainly fake it for a good cause and get shit done to move the junk off of my yard (double motivation). I get that haggling is a cultural difference, so it doesn't bother me, even while some of my fellow volunteers are really annoyed by it.

But this fucking guy and his wife were using it to run a scam. They'd split up, pester a person to knock an already absurdly low price down to something like a dollar for a 27 inch TV (I'm not exaggerating), get rejected, and then switch places and bring the item up to the person running the cashbox and claim that one of us had let them have it for pretty much nothing. On top of this the guy was a rude prick, yelling from across the yard when one of us was helping another customer and acting mad when we didn't immediately leave them to help him. He and his wife tried the price swap lie scam five or six times until we caught on, and then we basically stopped haggling and told him either pay five bucks for a TV or put it back and leave.

So, of course, five minutes later, his wife is bitching us out for not selling a DVD player for 2 dollars instead of four, when one of the other volunteers catches him with his car on the curb loading everything he could grab into the back of his car. Four TV's, a couple of VCR's, radios, and anything else electronic he could grab. We realized pretty quick that his wife was just running interference while he stole the entire electronics table's worth of stuff. Naturally he said that he had paid one of the other volunteers for the stuff, but we knew he was full of shit. They had a little game of pretending not to know English when confronted about their theft or lies on the prices of things, but spoke it just fine when it came time to argue over a twenty five cent price difference.

The president of the rescue, a woman to be feared when you invoke her wrath, bitched the guy out and got most of the shit back. We didn't call the cops on them, and I'm sure they made off with a pile of free shit that they stole in the end, even after getting himt o unload the extra TVs. In hind sight, I don't know if we should have or not. I'm not real good when confronted by truly shitty human behavior, but I see it often enough that I should be, although what I usually see is blatant racism. That's another post for another time though. Whether our decision was right or not, I'm sure as shit not letting that guy back on my property.

But back on my original point, people wonder why other people help animals rather than other people. I figure those people just haven't met enough other people yet to get it.