Need extra cash? More turning to yard sales that stretch for miles

KARTHAUS, Pa. -- Families looking for extra income to help brave the stormy economy may want to take a look in the back of their bedroom closets or the dusty corners of their garages. Those tight-fitting clothes or that rusty lawnmower could earn some extra dollars at a yard sale.

Apparently, hundreds more families this year are peddling wares on their front lawns or driveways. Yard sale listings across the country are up. Garage sale postings on Craigslist, one of the Internet's top sites for classified ads, rose 200% in the past two years.

Traffic to YardSaleSearch.com, a portal for potential sellers and bargain hunters, is up 16% from last year. And organizers of events such as the annual "World's Longest Yard Sale" — a 654-mile bargain-fest in early August that stretches from Alabama to Ohio — say more homes and communities are getting involved.

Similarly, Ray Saval, an organizer of the "100-Mile Yard Sale" held in mid-July in rural north-central Pennsylvania, reported that they added another 15 to 20 vendors this year.

"It keeps growing. It's actually 120 miles. ... With every phone call it got longer," joked Fawn Sensenig, who works with Saval in setting up the annual Pennsylvania event organized by the Quehanna Industrial Development Corp.

Organizers don't keep count of how many people come to the sale, though the normally desolate intersection outside the tiny town of Karthaus looked like the parking lot of a suburban strip mall during Christmas shopping season on the first day of this year's event.

Cars were tightly packed into rows, with more vehicles hugging the shoulders of the roads, as prospective visitors shopped for bargains.

It was a smaller, but similar scene five miles north of town, where cars lined the driveway and the road outside of Mary Ann Couteret's home to peruse old clothes of her four children, which were folded neatly on tables.