How do you find garage sales on Craigslist?

[dreamshark]

I understand why people are now advertising their garage sales on Craigslist instead of in the paper (*duh* it's free). But what I don't understand is how anybody ever FINDS those garage sales through Craigslist. Do any of you sale hounds consult Craigslist?

When I search on minneapolis->all minneapolis->for sale->garage sales I get 222 listings all over Minnesota. I don't even see a single Minneapolis location in the first page of results.  They are helpfully arranged in order by when they were posted rather than when they are occurring.

Ah, I see that there is a very very limited facility to sort the results: choice is between "newest" (the default) and "upcoming" (which may or may not refer to the date when the event is taking place? Well, they are no longer in order of posting date, but since the date of the event is not listed on the title page I don't know if that's what I wanted or not.

I then tried restricting the results by "on date" (tomorrow). Again, it changed the listings but I can't tell yet if it's what I want. There are still listings for Farmington, Blaine, White Bear Lake, Cambridge, etc. but not one for Minneapolis.

Okay, restricting the results to 3 miles from my zip code does narrow it down to my city, although they are still in no discernible order. Some of the listings helpfully included the actual address in the location that shows on the results page (THANK YOU!) but many just say "Minneapolis".  I guess I'll have to click on each listing individually to find out where it is.

This is SO MUCH HARDER than glancing through the newspaper.  Do any of you sale hounds use Craigslist? If so, what is your procedure? If not, how do you find yard/garage sales in this day and age?

ETA: Oh, this is ridiculous! Half of these listings don't say where they are even in the body of the post. WTF???

Comments

[mle292.livejournal.com]

There's a calendar on the left side of the page where a person can filter for dates, but other than that - I can see why you're frustrated.

I get no hits with "King Field" or "Southwest," so neighborhood names are apparently useless. There are some by suburban names, and wealthier people tend to get rid of better junk.

Every time I've looked for garage sales, I just drove to a nice neighborhood during garage sale season and looked for signs. Edina was good for garage sales 20 years ago, probably still is. That's the way I did it even when people used the newspaper. "Edina" gets some hits on CL. Good luck.

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

This is a good weekend for sales. St Albert the Great, 2836 33rd Ave S, Minneapolis, has a huge rummage sale, and the Standish-Ericsson Neighborhood Association is having many sales this weekend.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but HOW DID YOU FIND THAT OUT? Not on Craigslist, I'll bet.

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

I saw the St Albert's sign on the way home from the grocery store. In general, I find out about sales from signs in the neighborhood, or neighborhood papers like the Longfellow Messenger and the Corcoran paper (can't remember the name.) There will be maps at the Midtown Farmer's Market on Saturday. I never use Craig's List for sales. Google various neighborhoods - most of them have websites, and have calendars on the website, not of individual sales, but group sales, and events like church rummage sales.

I used to just ride around the area on my bike on Saturdays during the summer.

[quility.livejournal.com]

I have put a moratorium on garage saleing so it's been awhile - but i used to use a lovely website... Maybe this one? http://gsalr.com/garage-sales-minneapolis-mn.html

I have no info on how to use craigslist tho.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

actually, that is probably the problem. I have no particular desire to use Craigslist for this, that's just what I thought people were doing these days. Maybe they have moved on to better tools, like gsalr.com, which is why I couldn't find much of anything on Craigslist. Thanks - this looks very nice.

[mplsfish.livejournal.com]

Last weekend was apparently the roseville citywide sale. I live just south and had no idea until I started driving through. So yeah, the mechanism is broken at present.