“It doesn’t make sense that estate sales should thrive. But they do,” Lfeidel writes, about the fragile and persistent estate-sale industry.
An estate sale is only a true estate sale if the homeowner is dead. If the owner is living, then it’s a tag sale, though many people use the terms interchangeably. When I went to one of my first “estate sales,” in Hewlett Harbor, Long Island, roughly two years ago, just before the pandemic temporarily forced much of the industry online, I was surprised to discover that the owner was not only alive but there, in her soon-to-be-former house.
At that point, new customers started trickling in—women wearing leggings and couples looking fresh-faced, people who had stumbled upon the sale during a jog or a family outing. They marvelled at the offerings, usually with no intention to buy. “Beautiful. A steal!” a well-dressed man said. “Look at these old ’45s!” There were also people who had come to buy the basics: food, sheets, napkins. Winn, whose job is to get the best price for the homeowner, haggled over everything.
I started going to estate sales for the deals, but I rarely bought anything. Usually, I just watched—the people, but also the homes. It was like trick-or-treating or spying, but with the rubbernecking undisguised. Part of the fun was being able to do some light detective work about the owner. You could often tell, based on their book collection, if they had split with a spouse or made a career change.
In the nineteen-fifties, an explosion of advice manuals positioned estate sales as a knowledge trade—a way for middle-class housewives to score quality goods that might elevate their family’s social standing. The contemporary styles of that era, in turn, have played a major role since: “mid century” has been one of the most searched-for terms on estatesales.net, the industry’s premier site for estate-sale listings, for at least a decade.
The first place we saw that day was an apartment above a pharmacy, in Bensonhurst, where two adult daughters pointed out the primo items: their late mother’s adjustable Craftmatic bed and a set of prim undergarments that had been hand-sewn for her wedding in 1958.
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