This is an interview with a flea market vendor in CT.

A printable version of the following can be found here.


June 5th, 2005

"...then you come here and set up and listen to everyone bitch and scream about how early it is."

"Do you get here that early?"

"Oh, yeah, and they [shoppers] pay 20 dollars to get in from 6-7 [AM] and then after 7 o'clock it goes down to a buck and the interesting thing about it is that if it's too hot people don't wanna shop. They hit the road, and it's hot, ya'know, because it just hasn't been this warm--it's not unnormal for June but, actually, it was 50 degrees last week."

"What brings you to this flea market?"

"It's the best one."

"Why do you like it so much?"

"The people that come. People, [you] get people. Get people with class, get people with no class, you get the tourists looking for decoratives, you get the locals, it's [the flea market] a big size, it's well run, it's very strict but it keeps things running smoothly, so we've got a lot going for us..there's two down my way, but I don't like them--you don't make any money. Here you can do a thousand dollars out of a station wagon, not bad, right?"

"A thousand dollars on a Sunday?"

"On a Sunday. I've done, but it's not usual, but what I'm saying is it's done. You also need to realize that these people [vendors] have these trucks and vans that cost more than that to do business."

"Where do you get all your stuff?"

"Auctions, tag sales, garbage..I've found great stuff in garbage--somebody's garbage is somebody's treasure. Well I found my lamps in my neighbor's garbage...I took them home, fixed one piece on them, which actually I took off, I changed them over, and sold them the next week to this dealer I knew for 75 dollars and he painted them and changed them a little more, put them in her shop and sold them for about 150 dollars and they came out of the garbage."

"That's pretty awesome."

"Yeah, yeah, that's one of my favorite stories."

"Do you get satisfaction from that?"

"Well, first of all, I dont like all the garbage I see..but I mean I picked them up, fixed them over, put them in the right store, somebody bought them--they were from the fifties, it wasn't like it wasn't good quality but--meanwhile, now they're in somebody's house, must be a decent house 'cause I know the kind of shop they were in, ya'know, they have money to shop there, so it makes ya feel good."

"Wow, that's awesome."

"Well actually when you consider what they paid for the lamps, they were made in the fifties so they were paid for and everything, so today if you bought a brand new lamp of that quality it'd probably be close to a hundred and fifty. Anyway, so..."