Why I Don’t Like Estate Sales
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I was making small talk with someone at a party the other day. At some point the talk turned to vintage items, and she said, “I bet you get a lot of your stuff at estate sales, right? I love estate sales. I usually get there early so I can be at the front of the line when they let people in.” I replied that I too am a big estate sale fan.
That was a lie. I don’t actually enjoy going to estate sales, but I didn’t feel like getting into that with this person, so I just pretended to agree with her and then changed the subject. Afterward, though, I found myself repeatedly thinking about that exchange and some of its implications, so I decided it would be good to work out some of my thoughts in writing.
For starters, most estate sales happen because somebody has died, so there’s often an implicit sense of sadness hovering over the proceedings. As if to drive this point home, when I Googled “estate sale sign” so I could find a good photo to run at the top of this post, one of the search results I came across was this:
Of course, many of the items sold at vintage shops, at flea markets, and on eBay are also “dead people’s things,” but in those cases the deaths took place at some random time in the blurry past — not, like, last week. So the death attached to the vintage shop item feels more like an abstraction, and the backstory connected to it feels like a message found in a bottle that was cast into the sea eons ago. By contrast, the death attached to the estate sale item feels specific, and the story connected to it feels more fresh and therefore sorrowful, at least to me.
Moreover, we encounter most vintage items within the neutral space of a shop (or the sterile cyberspace of eBay), which tends to strip away most of the item’s personal context, while the estate sale takes place within the emotionally charged space of the deceased person’s home. This is always what gets to me the most. I remember the first time I attended an estate sale, somewhere in New Jersey about 30 years ago. My friend R and I got there right when they opened the doors, so everything was still intact, and I was struck by how you could really feel that this wasn’t just a house full of stuff — it was a life, a family’s life. Just being there felt somewhat intimate. Meanwhile, everyone (myself included) was racing from room to room, trying to be the first to claim the best and coolest items. It all felt somewhere between disrespectful and violative, like we were crashing a stranger’s funeral. I tried to imagine the same type of scene unfolding in the house where I’d grown up, the house where my parents had built a life and a family over the course of 50 years. The thought of it made me nauseous.