Heather and I like to go to garage sales. Every Saturday morning possible, we get out to as many sales as we can manage. Since I'm all about efficiency (college friends may recall my overuse of the efficient walk), and am an analyst by trade, I've devised a process to map out the best route to hit the highest number of sales:
- Go to the local newpaper's website, browse through the classifieds (Merchandise -> Garage Sales), and mark those in your vicinity, or those which are interesting.
- Copy the marked items, paste them as text into a new spreadsheet, and format the spreadsheet for printing. Print out the list. (Step 2 may be skipped)
- Enter each garage sale address into Microsoft Streets & Trips as a stop. Enter your home address as the Start and Stop for the trip.
- Click on "Optimize Stops", which will order the stops in the most efficient way.
- Click on "Get Directions", which will calculate the route and provide you with a map showing the route and all stops.
- Remove outliers by reviewing the map and deleting those addresses which are too far away from the rest of the route. This may involve referencing back to the original list you printed, so you can decide whether it is worth the extra drive depending on the description.
- Repeat steps 4 through 6 until you've reduced your list to a reasonable number of stops (I say this is about 25-30, Heather says this is about 10-15).
- Check your final routing against your original printed list, to make sure the times match up with the time you'll be going.
- Print off the directions (I also like to print an Overview Map), or take the computer out to your car and hook it up to your GPS.
- Find that priceless treasure you've been looking for and pay next to nothing for it.
Of course, you could probably use another mapping program. In fact, I'm not a huge fan of Streets and Trips, but the "Optimize Stops" feature really comes in handy.
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