Yard Sale Travelers Love DeKalb County by John Dersham

Last Thursday and Friday I spent most of each day at The World’s Longest Yard Sale. In the last couple years we have been talking to yard sale customers finding out where they are from, how far they are going in the yard sale and why they picked our portion of it. In doing this we learn a lot about our area. We also get the opportunity to give people our travel brochures and tell them all the things we have to do and see in DeKalb County. We invite them to make DeKalb County an overnight stay on their journey and encourage them to come back for a vacation.

This year I talked to people from Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Kentucky and of course Alabama. In my rather informal count of out of state plates I found in my couple days we seemed to have the most traffic from Georgia, Florida and Mississippi. I think many people coming up from the gulf start in our area since it is near the beginning entry of the yard sale. The DeKalb County Tourist Association is a key contact for the World’s Longest Yard Sale. Our website is linked to the WLYS and our phone number is given out as a source of information. Due to our high number of calls we get the opportunity to encourage our callers to visit our area for the yard sale. We tell them that we have a lot of yard sale vendors to visit but they also have a scenic venue to enjoy. We explain how the yard sale runs along the 93 mile Lookout Mountain Parkway, passing by Little River Canyon National preserve, DeSoto State Park, waterfalls and Mentone. We tell them about our nearly 150 rental cabins and 9 B&B’s. We tell them about Fort Payne, our hotels and restaurants, shopping, parks and museums.

In speaking with yard sale visitors I found some common reasons they landed in our area. Here are some of the reoccuring responses; scenic beauty, lots of vendors, no big cites with high traffic, lots of places to eat and spend the night. Some other comments came from people who make a vacation out of the yard sale. They have family or friends with them and they enjoy the leisure aspects of our area, such as hiking at DeSoto, taking the Little River Canyon rim drive, stopping at the water falls or milling around Mentone. Several stated they had been to various parts of the yard sale in the past, but were returning here because they like our section the most.

I feel DeKalb County is the ideal setting to combine shopping with vacationing. This is a theme we are trying to promote at the Tourist Information Center. We feel the language of yard sale combined with leisure travel fun, attract people to our area.

The WLYS is big business for DeKalb County. It fills our lodging facilities and restaurants. It brings unusually high sales to our area mini-markets and gas stations. Tourism is clean money that brings great amount of revenue to our county without high costs. Our visitors come and they spend money and add valuable revenue to our County and to our communities without the high cost of providing city and county services. Tourism usually brings quality people with good expendable income. We rarely have tourists committing crime in our area. The yard sale is big business and is very important to our local economy each year.