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Opportunity crime and the Great American Garage Sale
Abstract
Purpose
Due to several factors that include a declining economy, high unemployment, home down‐sizing trends and the aging population, the weekend private home sales have permeated every residential neighborhood in the country. Countless households have garage sales, and many times they contain items of considerable value. Little is known about this vast phenomenon and its potential for criminal opportunity. Based on a survey of North Texas residents that held a garage sale, the authors aimed to extract some important findings on a topic that has had little attention.
Design/methodology/approach
Due to the exploratory nature of the study, descriptive statistics were utilized to provide insight into what takes place at garage sales. The areas of concentration in this research included the independent variables of the home garage sale environment and the dependent variables of theft and deviant behavior. Although several environmental factors were examined.
Findings
Findings included thefts, inquiry to buy guns, small organized groups working to distract watchers, changing prices, and attempting intimidation with inappropriate remarks.
Research limitations/implications
This research has several limitations that require explanation. First, the authors utilized a convenience sample by mailing to addresses from public newspapers. The study findings suggested that future research utilize a larger random sample of different areas over a longer period of time to increase generalizability.
Practical implications
The researchers realize that each state and city may be different from the area studied and may not be applicable to everyone. Nevertheless, this study highlights the need for, as well as provides the basis for, additional interest in determining crime at garage and yard sales.
Social implications
The study suggested offenders may be attracted into neighborhoods where, as strangers, they are not recognized as strangers therefore allowing them unrestricted access to communities.
Originality/value
Crime and associated criminal activity and yard sales have been overlooked. Not until they seem to permeate every neighborhood has anyone related them to crime. Little is known about this vast phenomenon and its potential for criminal opportunity.
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You may recognize the name Elizabeth Warren. A Harvard law professor, she is one of the co-authors of As We Forgive Our Debtors and The Fragile Middle Class. The co-author of this book is her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, a business consultant. Together they bring an interesting perspective to the financial reality faced by many families today. They point out that bankruptcy is becoming increasingly common. The authors argue that bankruptcy is not the result of deadbeats and extravagant spenders as is argued by many of the proponents for change in the bankruptcy laws. Increasingly fragile middle-class families living too close to the edge without any safety net are causing the increase in bankruptcy numbers in today's society. The most common attributes of persons filing for bankruptcy today are a lost job, a serious medical problem, and divorce. Almost 90 percent of the new bankruptcy filings, according to the authors, follow one of these three life events. Another point raised by Warren and Tyagi is the cost of children. At one time, children were considered assets to a family, but that is no longer true. Children are expensive and the benefits that parents enjoy from children today are strictly non-financial. The authors go so far as to say that having a child is the best predictor that a woman will end in financial collapse. Many middle-class families believed that sending the second parent into the labor market would make life easier, at least financially. It is true that women have opportunities and incomes that were unheard of just a generation ago. But even with that, having two earners in the family appears to have lessened the family's ability to withstand financial disaster because these two-income families have given up the backup provision of having a parent at home who could tend to aged parents, take care of children outside of school, and enter the labor market in times of disaster, such as job loss or disability.
In this paper we present a "routine activity approach" for analyzing crime rate trends and cycles. Rather than emphasizing the characteristics of offenders, with this approach we concentrate upon the circumstances in which they carry out predatory criminal acts. Most criminal acts require convergence in space and time of likely offenders, suitable targets and the absence of capable guardians against crime. Human ecological theory facilitates an investigation into the way in which social structure produces this convergence, hence allowing illegal activities to feed upon the legal activities of everyday life. In particular, we hypothesize that the dispersion of activities away from households and families increases the opportunity for crime and thus generates higher crime rates. A variety of data is presented in support of the hypothesis, which helps explain crime rate trends in the United States 1947-1974 as a byproduct of changes in such variables as labor force participation and single-adult households.
The U.S. garage sale incorporates elements of both gift and commodity exchange in a dynamic tension, one that complicates traditional characterizations of gift and commodity as oppositional and mutually exclusive. Despite its apparently marketlike mechanisms, much of garage sale exchange also partakes of the character of gift giving. The elasticity in pricing in this home-based exchange allows sellers to take social relations into account, so that objects that change hands become hybrid varieties of “inalienable commodities.”
Although bargaining is often used in the purchase of high-priced items, Americans are ambivalent about the practice of haggling. The U.S. garage sale is one of the few venues where numbers of Americans bargain for low- to moderately priced goods, but common understandings about garage-sale bargaining are unevenly shared among American participants, who are accustomed to fixed-price merchandise. Students and foreign-born participants from cultures with more robust bargaining styles afford a contrast with the preferred American pattern of socially engaged bargaining, allowing the underlying normative patterns and strategies for American garage-sale bargaining to emerge. The polarization that can ensue from bargaining negotiations also highlights the under-documented cultural values of friendliness and pleasantness that ideally surround commercial transactions in the United States.
This article explores the community-building potential of neighborhood garage sales, focusing on case examples in suburban developments and city block sales, and contrasting them with student housing, town/rural, and cooperative sales. Under the auspices of attracting more shoppers and making some extra money by cleaning out unneeded goods, neighborhood sales get residents out of their dwellings and mingling among themselves, sometimes for the first time. Some neighborhood sales have been organized expressly for the purpose of getting the neighbors to know one another in areas undergoing transition. They provide a positive means to combat a perceived "decline of community" in the United States today, developing both bonding and binding social capital. The most successful sales for community building occur in neighborhoods that have: houses relatively close together with a high density of sales to facilitate walking; few other community integrating activities; capable organizers with a vision of community; some children and child-friendly events; festive touches, such as selling food; and other community organizations integrated into the sales. Neighborhood sales also define the neighborhood to the larger community, as well as promote internal solidarity.
Although bargaining is often used in the purchase of high-priced items, Americans are ambivalent about the practice of haggling. The U.S. garage sale is one of the few venues where numbers of Americans bargain for low- to moderately priced goods, but common understandings about garage-sale bargaining are unevenly shared among American participants, who are accustomed to fixed-price merchandise. Students and foreign-born participants from cultures with more robust bargaining styles afford a contrast with the preferred American pattern of socially engaged bargaining, allowing the underlying normative patterns and strategies for American garage-sale bargaining to emerge. The polarization that can ensue from bargaining negotiations also highlights the under-documented cultural values of friendliness and pleasantness that ideally surround commercial transactions in the United States.
Situational crime prevention can be characterized as comprising measures (1) directed at highly specific forms of crime (2) that involve the management, design, or manipulation of the immediate environment in as systematic and permanent a way as possible (3) so as to reduce the opportunities for crime and increase its risks as perceived by a wide range of offenders. These measures include various forms of target hardening (making the objects of crime less vulnerable), defensible space architecture (which encourages residents in housing projects to exercise territorial surveillance of the public spaces outside their dwellings), community crime prevention initatives (e. g., neighborhood watch and citizen patrol schemes), and a number of less-easily categorized measures such as improved coordination of public transport with pub closing times, or more sensitive public housing allocation policies that avoid the concentration of children in particular housing developments. Traditional criminological theories ha...
Developments in a number of academic disciplines-the sociology of deviance, criminology, economics, psychology-suggest that it is useful to see criminal behavior not as the result of psychologically and socially determined dispositions to offend, but as the outcome of the offender's broadly rational choices and decisions. This perspective provides a basis for devising models of criminal behavior that (1) offer frameworks within which to locate existing research, (2) suggest directions for new research, (3) facilitate analysis of existing policy, and (4) help to identify potentially fruitful policy initiatives. Such models need not offer comprehensive explanations; they may be limited and incomplete, yet still be "good enough" to achieve these important policy and research purposes. To meet this criterion they need to be specific to particular forms of crime, and they need separately to describe both the processes of involvement in crime and the decisions surrounding the commission of the offense itself. Developing models that are crime specific and that take due account of rationality will also demand more knowledge about the ways in which offenders process and evaluate relevant information. Such a decision perspective appears to have most immediate payoff for crime control efforts aimed at reducing criminal opportunity.
During the past few decades several scholars have studied garage sales. Recent works focus on certain time periods and/or gender issues, while others have examined the social implications and economic dimensions of sales. This study is a unique contribution to garage sale research because it is the first to analyze garage sales geographically. The project begins by offering a number of definitions for what is a garage sale and examines their connection to material culture. It also addresses why garage sales are held and who typically attends those events. Next, following the pattern set by other scholars the Jonesboro, Arkansas data are used to calculate new estimates for the number of garage sales held annually in the United States and the amount of money that changes hands at those venues. Chronologically, the greatest number of sales in Jonesboro occur in the late summer/early fall which coincides with the national garage sale season which peaks in early fall. Finally, the geographic distribution of garage sales in Jonesboro reveals a number of significant socioe-conomic trends—sale locations are positively correlated with income and negatively associated with race.
The study of one type of second-order market, personal sales, indicated that various consumer attitudes and merchandising
strategies were related to utilization of this market. Similarities and differences between this market and other second-order
markets were also noted.
Using survey data from a western U.S. county (N = 595), we examined how lower, middle, and higher income families negotiate a period of economic stress-the closing of a major employer in the community-through their shopping patterns. Specifically, we examined their participation in local thrift economies such as yard sales and secondhand stores. We found that lower and middle income households shop more frequently at these venues. They also tend to shop more for furniture and clothing, whereas higher income households tend to shop for antiques and trinkets. These relationships varied across the type of thrift economy examined. Overall, findings support the argument that engagement in thrift economies may constitute one mechanism families use during periods of economic stress.
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