Can bargain hunting help change behaviour? Findings from Garage Sale Trail
Garage Sale Trail is an Australian phenomenon that gets communities taking part in a day of garage sales all across the country. In 2015, over 13,000 sales took place with over 350,000 participants. Garage Sale Trail is now Australia’s fastest growing community and sustainability programme.
Its huge success is partly because it builds on existing behaviours within the society (garage sales are an Australian institution) but it’s been very effective in tapping into other trends and insights into human behaviour. It uses the power of the web to let buyers know when sales are happening and what bargains they can find. But unlike e-Bay, the fact that buyers and sellers meet in each other’s gardens means that new relationships are created. On average every participant makes ten new connections. As Darryl, one of the co-founders says “it’s difficult to ignore your neighbour when they walk past wearing a pair of your old jeans”. Garage Sale Trail creates a huge, local one-day market for unwanted goods, with thousands of potential buyers for people’s unwanted items. It’s a great impetus for people to get finally rid of all the stuff they no longer need or want. For buyers, it represents not only a great opportunity to find a bargain but a unique chance to have a nosy round their neighbour’s stuff.
Credit: Lucy Dawkins
Building on this success, we ran a pilot project here in the UK last year. Over 200 sales took place across three pilot sites, in Yorkshire, London and the South Coast. Working with the University of Northampton, we measured the impact on participants regarding their sense of civic pride, their likelihood to volunteer again and the number of new relationships established on the day of the sale. As well as estimating the amount of waste diverted from landfill, we also tried to capture whether taking part would have any impact on people’s ongoing behaviour around reuse and recycling. The feedback and evidence we got back was almost universally positive:
- 97% of buyers and sellers stated that they made new connections – on average they made 10 new connections by taking part
- 66% of sellers said that after their experience of taking part in Garage Sale Trail they feel more positive about their community and 74% felt more motivated to volunteer
- 19,000kg of waste diverted from landfill and 100,000kg+ of carbon was saved
- 86% of buyers said they were either very likely or likely to try to sell their unwanted goods again, instead of throwing them away.
As one participant put it: “We took part because all had a load of stuff that we wanted to get rid of. We all had great fun on the day and managed to sell quite a few things and we met loads of new people by taking part“.
Credit: Lucy Dawkins
To test whether there was any long-term impact in April we ran a survey of the participants to see whether the positive impact reported on the day was still in evidence six months after the event.
Following their involvement in the Garage Sale Trail, 64% of participants claim to be more likely to try and sell their unwanted goods rather than throwing them away. Whilst, 39% of participants were more likely to recycle at home or work. Meanwhile, 62% of participants felt more positive about their neighbourhood and 69% of participants claim to have maintained the new neighbourhood connections being made through taking part in Garage Sale Trail.
The support of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation through the Ideas and Pioneers Fund is helping us work towards a large-scale UK Garage Sale Trail activation in early 2017.
Credit: Lucy Dawkins
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