Yard Sale vs. Garage Sale vs. Rummage Sale vs. Tag Sale
Everyone calls it something different, when they are essentially the same thing. We've decided there needs to be a moderating authority to help us understand the finer nuances. We nominate ourselves as that authority. ;-)
A yard sale is something you have in your yard.
A garage sale is something you have in your garage.
A rummage sale is a local phenomenon reserved for the Great Lakes states, particularly Wisconsin it seems. Go cheeseheads!
A tag sale also seems to be a local phenomenon reserved for the U.S. Northeast, particularly Connecticut.
So the real battle seems to be yard sales vs. garage sales. Garage sales used to be the leader for quite some time, but yard sales just recently surpassed them. Here's proof.
Here is our theory: Americans are notorious packrats. Cheap credit + cheap Chinese imports = lots of stuff. What started as an event we could hold out of our garages, now has to be held in the yard. We have become burgeoned with junk. And stuff. And more and more useless trinkets. All the garages in the world could not contain the items we need to get rid of.
So we let it spill into our yards, and the popularity of the yard sale surges upward....
For our earth's sake, we hope our stuff self-reduces until it can fit in the garage. Until then, garage sales are dead - long live the yard sale!