It’s garage sale season, and Anchorage, Alaska is going all out

On a recent Saturday in June, nearly a dozen homes on the west side of Anchorage, Alaska had items littered on lawns and driveways — power tools, hunting and fishing gear, pink lemonade in small, red plastic cups.

At one sale, Grace Petersen was kneeling on a tarp in a backyard, digging through a mountain of clothes.

“We love to do this Saturday mornings,” she said.

Petersen was stuffing fuzzy overalls and button up shirts into a brown paper bag. At this sale, shoppers can fill it with as much as it’ll hold for $10. Her bag was overflowing.

It’s garage sale season. In Anchorage, like in many places, households are coming together to throw neighborhood-wide events. These massive sales draw in residents from around the city. And this year, some say rising costs are making the queues more worthwhile than ever.

Petersen said she doesn’t normally set money aside for clothes shopping because she can’t afford to.

“My husband and I make a combined salary more than my parents ever did when I was growing up, and I felt like my parents were so much more comfortable and struggled way less than we do,” Petersen said.

If Petersen were to buy this bag of clothes new, she expects it’d set her back a couple hundred dollars. She calls herself a “big thrifter,” and said she’s always looking for ways to get more bang for her buck. But it’s not easy.

“I'd say at least 50% off means a good deal,” she said. “It's crazy how easy it is to just spend, even at places like this or thrift stores, you feel the hit if you go crazy there too.”

In cities around the country each summer, homeowners declutter and earn some extra cash while shoppers swarm to hunt for deals on the stuff that catches their eyes. Each August, one massive sale stretches from Alabama to Michigan along U.S. Route 127.

Josh Randall, director of media relations for the sale, called the 127 Yard Sale, said the event brings an economic burst to rural communities across more than 600 miles.

“The whole idea was to kind of draw people off of some of the big routes to go through the areas, to get that traffic, and just to have people experience what they might not usually ever see,” Randall said. “Even to this day, almost the entire route is still very rural.”

Back in Anchorage, Elgin Dobbins was selling knickknacks and household items alongside more than 30 other residents at Mountain City Church. Everything he sold was donated by community members, and he donates all proceeds to charity.

“We usually take whatever they offer us,” Dobbins said. “People say, ‘Well, how much?’ I said, ‘How much you want to donate?’ It's just something to get people in, and everything we make is gravy, because everything's donated.”

Dobbins said the annual sale brings a lot of traffic, especially on somewhat sunny days like today.

Alaska’s short summer creates a highly concentrated window of garage sales. Samantha Ruppert lists roughly 30 of them in and around Anchorage on a spreadsheet she created. She threw her own neighborhood-wide sale in early June and said dozens of her neighbors joined in.

Doing it this way draws more shoppers, she said.

“If people know that there's going to be multiple homes, they're more likely to take the time out of their day, if they know that it's not just one and done,” Ruppert said.

Ruppert said she made about $1,800 during the two-day sale. Along with earning the money, she also met some of her neighbors for the first time.

“I could tell that they really craved connection and wanted to connect and know who I was, and I wanted to know who they were too, because I've seen them drive by for years and years, right around the cul-de-sac, and we never talked before,” she said. “Now whenever they drive by, it's a little bit different.”