![]() The first few names on the list are always “pickers”-estate-sale obsessives, usually low-level furniture, silver, or jewelry dealers-who wait outside the sales for most of the night in their cars, sometimes in teams, with each person taking a shift. Hours before a sale begins, an estate- or tag-sale company will put out a sign-in sheet that determines the order in which people will be allowed into the home. ![]() The sheet, I later learned, was “the list”-one of the many aspects of estate-sale culture that is at once quaint and slightly murderous. “Ricardo M.?” she asked, reading off the sheet. The group surged toward her like an audience at a concert as she removed a sheet of paper from a plastic shopping bag and cleared her throat. The regulars recognized her-she was Madeline Winn, the owner of the company that was hosting the sale. “It’s like an addiction!”Īt 10 A.M., a slim, brunette woman wearing a long-sleeved shirt that read “Full of Surprizes Estate & Tag Sales” emerged from the house and walked onto the lawn. “You’ll find that this is a culture,” she said. When I introduced myself to one of the elderly women up front and admitted to her that I was a newbie, she promptly pulled me into a hug. I arrived thirty minutes early, but a long line had already formed outside people were peering into the windows, hands cupping their eyes. The house was a beige Colonial-style four-bedroom with prim hedges and a small, sloping lawn. A recent widow, she wandered through the rooms, dazed, dressed in a fringed denim vest. When I went to one of my first “estate sales,” in Hewlett Harbor, Long Island, roughly two years ago, just before the pandemic temporarily forced much of the industry online, I was surprised to discover that the owner was not only alive but there, in her soon-to-be-former house. If the owner is living, then it’s a tag sale, though many people use the terms interchangeably. ![]() An estate sale is only a true estate sale if the homeowner is dead.
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