More than two annual garage/yard sales should be prohibited from taking place at people’s homes. Instead, people should be required to bring their items for sale to dedicated locations specifically set up as a flea market/swap meet and held, preferably, on a daily basis, or at least on weekends. These locations could include several booths of various sizes to accommodate the demand and a small booth rental fee could be charged, enough to cover the costs of operating the flea market.

Alternatively, people with things to sell but who are not interested in investing the effort to sell them themselves could sign an agreement with the managers of such a facility to sell such things for them. In return, the facility would get a percentage of the proceeds from these sales. Perhaps the items sold in this way could have their prices reduced every day or few days until they are either sold or worth so little that they could be recycled or otherwise disposed. Perhaps items that didn’t sell could be placed into a ‘free’ pile of stuff that people could scavenge through and take for free.

Taken a few steps further, items brought to these locations could also be photographed, described, assigned a few key words, and placed on the Internet where a much larger market is available. The prices could be set by the original owner of the item or by the managers of this facility if that was agreed to. The price would then be lowered a little bit every day or few days until somebody buys it or until the price gets so low, that it is not worth continuing the listing. In such cases, the item would remain listed for a few more days as free. If nobody wants it, it would be recycled or otherwise disposed of. The operators of this system would naturally get a percentage of the sales to finance this system.