Today you go to a flea market and you find stall after stall selling cheap imports. Everything New...Nothing fun. If its an indoor flea market you might as well forget it - 90% of the booths will be new stuff and the few with old stuff will call them collectibles and have high prices. Most of the flea markets in this area also have an outdoor section where you can still find people selling "JUNK". These people are selling things they want to get rid of with prices starting at twenty five cents. With in there junk you can find your treasures!
Years ago I used to do a lot of Flea Marketing in South Florida. These were all outside Flea Markets and everyone had "JUNK". It was great - you could find all kinds of interesting things and at a price you could afford. Being a comic collector I would find comics sometimes as low as ten cents or even a nickel. Books for under a dollar. And the weird - the wonderful weird things you had no idea why you bought them, but you had to have them and the price was right.
But people started even with the outdoor markets bring NEW stuff. Cheap new stuff. The fun of finding a treasure got less and less. Today you really have to hunt for those treasures. They still pop up - found a 3D superman comic from 1954 about three years ago for $3. Yard sales are now the way to go to find the Treasures.
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Comments: 9
There is the flea market greed, which will cause dropped prices on a nicer item from time to time. Something will come out that you can just get at flea markets - and it starts selling. Everyone in the market will run to carry it - now we end up with too much and in order to move they start undercutting one another.
Now you can find some nice mom and pop stores in flea markets where the rent is low enough for them to exist, but most flea market merchants are sellers of cheap new junk. If someone does have some nice collectibles they are selling the as antiques and asking high prices.
I still miss the days when a flea market was a gathering of people that were selling stuff they wanted to get rid of, not a group of small business. It was a lot more fun.
Sandra - you are lucky to still have a local flea market that's good. I wish that we did here. I still go when ever I can get off on a weekend. But the good deal and the weird stuff just is way to far between now.