1. For the Swap Meet, get ready to get up early. Very bloody early. At the swap meet we attended sellers could arrive and set up from 6am, but when we arrived at that time, it was to find everyone else already set up. The buying begins in earnest at 7am and here, the early bird really does get the worm.
2. Be prepared – people will buy things you never actually imagined someone would want.
3. Be honest – if it’s broke, don’t lie. They will probably hunt you down.
4. Don’t look around. Don’t even take a sneak peak, the object of the game is to get rid of, nay, re-home your own old shit, not acquire someone else’s.
5. This is my philosophy, and regular sellers might disagree, but if you make enough money to cover the fee for your space (about $7) anything else is a win. After all, these people are doing you the favour by de-junking your life.
6. People are going to haggle and bargain. You are going to sell a once read, $20 book in perfect condition for a measly $2. Relax and read point 5 again.
7. There are some things you should absolutely not forget
a. Change
b. Some old plastic bags – people are pains, they expect you to provide a bag goddamnit.
c. Coffee
d. Helpers
8. Remember this - kids are great, this is the market you really want to capture. They don’t have much capital, but they sure know how to work what they’ve got.
The benefits of turning a mountain of unwanted and unused stuff into liquid assets is sort of self-evident. But the joy of swap meets, 5am starts aside, is that they are a lot of fun. Toys that have been gathering dust for decades are returned to their intended purpose – making kids smile and parents cry in frustration. Bargaining with an 8 year old over the price is all part of the fun. Interacting with young and old, compulsive bargain shoppers and the casual passersby are experiences that invoke words like ‘community’ and make you feel a part of something bigger than yourself. (ie. An extremely budget conscious shopping spree.)
But why should you buy someone elses stuff? When I sold my racing bike a few months ago the purchaser said that as much as possible, she avoids buying new things. Why on earth would that be? Here’s an idea – there is so much stuff in the world, on shelves, in boxes, garages and trash mountains. Every time we buy more we use more resources and times soon change, fashions fade and the items become waste, sometimes so fast the thing has barely even been worn yet. We are a society developed beyond anything humans have previously achieved and we are wasteful beyond all measure.
Affluence directly corresponds to wastefulness.
And this is, if nothing else, stupid. It’s like craft in primary school. Think back to those days at tiny desks, fingers dirty with crayon dust. Remember being given a task to cut a shape from a piece of paper. “Don’t,” says the teacher, “start cutting your shape in the middle of the paper because you only get one piece of paper and you are going to have to cut a whole heap of other shapes.”
We never did learn did we?
Well why don’t we start to be less wasteful, and more innovative, right now. Although you know, outside the clique of snappy vintage dressers and bargain hunters, ‘second hand’ has a fairly bad reputation. Twice every year suburbia’s rejections are piled on the verge for local councils to come and remove. In the time it takes for that to occur, whatever’s on the verge is yours for the picking. The only thing holding you back is the fact you’re about to dig through someone’s rubbish and that is not a very affluent thing to do. I for one get very nervous at the idea, just as I do at the notion of digging through a bargain bin. Remember that poor kid at school who only ever wore hand me downs? So when I spotted a coffee table in need of just a little TLC, I conned my Dad into acquiring it for me, lest I be seen. Since then I’ve become a little more game, and have acquired hanging baskets, a bicycle wheel, chair for my front porch and a garden rake. I have to say, I feel liberated. It’s as exciting as the joy of the hunt in second hand shops, where (on a good day) you can emerge with 3 pairs of levis for $20, and feel more or less as though you have conquered the world and discovered its most hidden treasures.
Whilst ‘re-homing’ these items I scrambled over countless junked analogue TV’s. The Age of Digital has arrived and in home across the ‘western’ world, the humble analogue is being ousted. I am not against this but still I wonder, can’t there be a better, more useful future for these TV’s than landfill?
Had I the space, I’d build a tower sculptor from them. As it turns out, I am not alone.
[See more http://inhabitat.com/your-analog-tv-is-dead-repurpose-it-into-something-fun/ ]
So here I go again, getting preachy, but take it from me, shopping for old quality at an affordable price rather than new cheapness that’s costly all round is something I simply aspire to do all the time. As they say, not much in life is free, so we may as well enjoy it when it is.
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