Episode 11. Our guest is Kevin — the Tennessee Picker — a friend of mine for nine years and one of the first people who watched John and me when we were doing our very first podcast back in the This Weekend in Reselling days. The title of this episode came easy. By the end of the conversation Ryan and I were both looking at Kevin like, “Sir, you cannot just say that on a podcast.” He absolutely could, and he did. Twice.

Auction Web, money orders, and a Polaroid scanned into the computer

[6:02] Kevin has been on eBay for 29 years. He started when it was still called Auction Web. He couldn’t afford a digital camera in the late 90s, so he took Polaroids of his items, scanned the Polaroids into the computer, off-hosted the photos on an FTP server, and embedded them into his eBay descriptions with raw <img> tags. Buyers paid by money order — you held the package until the envelope showed up, then you shipped. The opening 20 minutes of this episode is a tour through eBay history I didn’t know I needed.

The eBay drop-off store he ran in the mid-2000s

[7:00] Before the YouTube era, Kevin was the general manager of three locations of a chain called Nu Markets — direct competitors to I Sold It On eBay. People walked in with stuff, signed a contract, and Kevin’s team photographed it, listed it, shipped it, and took 33% of the hammer price. They had a photographer on staff. They held classes to teach customers what to look for at yard sales so they’d bring better inventory back in to consign.

The break-even per store was $30K a month and the math eventually broke — every listing had to start at $9.99 because buy-it-now cost extra back then, so a $100 item could close at $30 and the consignor wouldn’t come back. But the model itself? Ryan and I were half-joking we’d happily drop our death pile off somewhere and collect 67% of the hammer price.

The neighborhood yard sale he invented

[1:04:14] Here it is. The story Ryan and I have been holding for the back half of the episode the whole time.

Kevin lives near a 250-to-300 house neighborhood that gets one or two yard sales a weekend but had never organized a neighborhood-wide one. Houses he knew had never run a sale before, that he was certain were sitting on stuff. So Kevin — and I want to be clear that I am only the journalist here — drew the neighborhood’s letterhead in AutoCAD, made a flyer that said “hey guys, let’s rally together and have a neighborhood yard sale,” and bulk-mailed it to every address in the neighborhood through the post office. Set the suggested start time at 7 a.m., which is an hour earlier than anything starts in his area.

Sale morning, Kevin filled his car three times before any other reseller had figured out the neighborhood was even live. He did this once. They’ve held it on the same weekend every year since.

[1:03:49] “And that’s not the only one. I’ve done two or three more now, too.”

Kevin allegedly created at least four annual neighborhood yard sales in his region. The neighborhoods do not know. Allegedly.

The “diversion sale” Facebook posts (Kevin says he is reformed)

[1:08:02] Then he goes, “Okay, this is bad. I also used to do diversion yard sales on Facebook.” Ryan and I both said no before he could finish the sentence. He kept going.

There are mountains near him with parkway access where it takes 30 minutes to drive up to the address. So Kevin made a fake Facebook profile (Ron Weston, RIP), picked an address on top of one of those mountains where nobody actually lived (most of those properties are short-term rentals), posted screenshots of toy collections / video game collections / vintage T-shirt collections, captioned it “no early birds, first come first serve, do not contact me about inventory,” and posted it the night before a sunny Saturday. The other resellers in the area would burn an hour driving up the mountain to find absolutely nothing — and Kevin would be hitting the actual sales they would’ve gotten to first.

He swears he doesn’t do this anymore. He says he’s a changed man. [1:09:49] “I am a changed man.”

I love Kevin. I would also like the record to show that I’ve been telling Candice for years that yard-sale competition in our area has gotten suspiciously coordinated and now I have new theories.

The day job and the part-time pivot

[43:34] Kevin is an architectural draftsman by trade — he designs Pilot Travel Centers for a living. He went full-time reselling in 2020, killed it through 2021, and then got pulled back into the day job after his mother got sick (she passed about a year and a half ago, and he talks about it briefly here — worth listening to with a little extra patience). He’s part-time on YouTube and eBay now, working 55-60 hour weeks at Pilot, still sitting on a 600-square-foot office full of inventory he’s slowly moving wholesale to local buyers.

The Pilot tangent goes places. Kevin gets into Jimmy Haslam owning both Pilot and the Cleveland Browns, the $25-billion-a-year scale of the company, and the fact that he can be walking to the bathroom at the office and spot something pickable on the way.

How we met (Highway 70, John’s one-headlight truck, the megaphone)

[1:14:18] Kevin and I didn’t meet in Tennessee — we met on Tennessee, at the Highway 70 sale that runs from Nashville to Memphis. John and I were doing the This Weekend in Reselling podcast back then, John was driving his look-what-I-found van with the perpetually-burning-out single headlight, and Kevin happened to stop at the same yard sale we did. He turned around when John called his name and we’ve been friends since.

The follow-up trip was the 127 sale — Highway 127 — which runs Michigan to Alabama and is the biggest yard sale event of the year. [1:13:00] Candice and I have been talking about doing the 127 again this August. Kevin’s already in. Ryan, you’re invited.

The garage-sale season is genuinely on fire right now

[24:14] A real take from this episode that has nothing to do with diabolical schemes: garage sales are back. Kevin and I both noticed thrift stores dried up around 2020 and garage sales followed. This year — for the first time since COVID — Candice and I are buying so much on Friday and Saturday mornings that we’re calling it quits by 3 p.m. with a full vehicle. Kevin’s theory: pre-COVID sellers are coming back to the driveway, and the COVID-era resellers who were our competition have mostly dropped off. Whatever the reason, if you stopped going to garage sales in 2022 because they got picked over, this is your year to try again.

Closing

This was a two-and-a-half-hour episode and we covered maybe a third of what I wanted to. Kevin’s been sitting on a career’s worth of stories and Ryan and I were laughing too hard to dig into half of them. Go subscribe to Tennessee Picker — Kevin drops a video every now and then, and they’re worth waiting for.

If you live in East Tennessee and your neighborhood suddenly has a brand-new annual yard sale that nobody quite remembers organizing — at least now you know.

We’ll see y’all in the next one.