Season 4 Episode 23: Yard Sale

May 13, 1990

Published 05/13/90

Al works out that his wife has been systematically buying other people’s discarded possessions for more than a decade, from yard sales across all four corners of the neighborhood, and that the accumulated result is in his house. The remedy is obvious and the family commits to it: they will hold a yard sale of their own and convert the junk back into money.

Nobody comes. What follows is a series of escalating attempts to attract customers to a driveway full of things nobody wanted the first time, including Bundy Burgers, which had previously been forced on people and are here refused even by strangers.

Al’s explanation for the failure is the best piece of economics in the series. Yard sales, he says, run on the Bigger Idiot Theory: you are relying on a bigger idiot coming along to buy what you already know is worthless. The flaw in the theory is left hanging, and it does not need stating, because the whole family is standing in the driveway when he says it. The episode also contains the Dog Dream, a recurring fantasy in which Al wants to be Buck, and Kelly’s response to catching him mid-dream is to pat him on the head and tell him he is a good boy. He lifts his head and smiles. As a season closer it is unusually low-key. There is no stunt, no location, no guest star of consequence, just the family standing in their own driveway failing to sell their own belongings. After a season that had taken them to Las Vegas, a music video shoot and a wrestling ring, ending on a driveway reads as a deliberate choice.