The Long Beach Flea Market was a disaster…

(Here is the old beater Dodge piled high with our loot.)

We left the Brick House at about 3am in order to get to Long Beach at 5:30am. There was no hope of sleeping the night before so we just stayed up…I was surprisingly chipper and peppy when we arrived – ready to wheel and deal.

Above is the gypsy caravan of vendors all lined up getting ready to set-up for the day…it was still dark out and dealers (or just extreme collectors) were going through peoples truck loads with flashlights looking for deals. Before we even parked we had five or six people try to unpack and unwrap our stuff to get a better look – it was so weird!

Some shots of the booth.

It pretty much looked like this ALL DAY. We didn’t sell crap – like about 5 things and only made $90 – we didn’t even break even. The big ticket items that sold were a lamp at $40 and a 1940’s tanker chair for $30. Some little ceramic things sold as well…

Lots of people stopped by and looked at things and touched things and asked prices and said they would come back – which they never did. No one haggled. It seemed like everyone was a sort of just browsing the market without actually buying anything. All day visitors were empty handed…

It was a weird long day – all of the vendors were doing AWFUL. Nothing was selling…no one was a serious buyer…and there were some great things at really reasonable prices! It was discouraging.

Across from us was this booth of vintage “Euro” linen – they had like a thousand signs that said “Euro”. They did pretty well selling $3 cotton bags and $2 tea towels – so as we drank more beer and got more discouraged I wanted to say that everything I had was “Euro” to make it sexier or something.

We drank and gossiped with our vendor neighbors all day.

Now I have all this stuff and I would like to clear it out of my house – but no more flea markets. It was a total waste of time and you have to get up way way way to early.