Several weeks ago my wife and I participated in our neighborhood yard sale. We had high aspirations for the day, anticipating to make a few extra dollars and unload some trash to be recycled as someone elses treasure.
Before the day officially began, my wife Jessica had an amazing idea to lure in the yard sale shoppers. She suggested that we offer miscellaneous “free” items and place them in a basket towards the end of all of our items. What she had in mind was attracting anyone who came by as if these free items were bloody steaks and the customers were carnivorous animals (well, the latter may be true in certain parts of the state).
Anyways, to make a long story short, no one picked-up one free item! At this my wife was dumbfounded, “How could one item not be picked-up?” “How did the ’bait’ fail to lure in and snag our prey?”
I said something along the following lines to my wife, “Items without cost are items without value.”
So I went back inside and made a sign that read, “ALL items 25 cents.” And go figure, nearly all of the items that were in the basket were snatched up and paid for within an hour, whereas no items were picked-up for free in the previous 3 hours!
In the same way that yard sale items are not valued without cost, so too…
Posted by Jesse Wisnewski 
