My Phlea Market Filosophy:
I operate a junk removal business. All of my merchandise not only comes to me for free, but someone paid me to take it away. Not a bad place to start.
I often sell stuff at an auction, which works well for stuff I never want to see again and don't care how much I get for it, which is most of the stuff. I will often see that some items sell too cheap, and get mildly annoyed (remember I got it for free) but I get over my annoyance when something sells for ridiculously high prices and I wonder "What was that person thinking?"
My philosophy for years has been that I didn't want to do flea markets because I didn't relish the idea of sitting at a booth all day and HOPING someone would buy my stuff, and then having to reload the unsold stuff when done, take it home and pack up again. But my Chosen One thought it would be fun and she convinced me to take a load to the Armada flea market about an hour away from me. Well we did it, and not only did we have fun but we profited after buying breakfast, lunch and paying for booth space about $250.00 my first time out of the gate. I think part of my enjoyment was the company. ;-) Mind you we had to spend all day to do that and a junk removal job making the same money would have take maybe two hours, but I digress...
Now mind you I used to have a warehouse, and it was not only costing me too much, but I had so much space that I was ACCUMULATING instead of selling. I now am down to four storage units which cost me a little over $500 per month (HALF what I was paying at the warehouse), but I am turning merchandise over. Also, one of the storage units is my workshop for breaking down scrap, cleaning and prepping, checking items to make sure they worked, and pricing merchandise for sale.
After this experience, and seeing what sells and what does not, I'm kind of jazzed to do it again. There is the Dixieland flea market just a few miles away from me and I will probably get a booth next weekend and see how it goes.
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