The best job I ever had was when my wife and I ran a booth at a flea market.
Ella and I were and still are yard sale rats. We pile the kids in the car on Saturday mornings and hit the road, sometimes with a MapQuested route and sometimes without. While we don't get as early of a start as we used to, we rarely come home empty-handed. Hell, the kids and I would only have underwear and socks if it weren't for yard sales (Ella's a professional so she claims she has to buy her clothes at a store, but every once in awhile even she will buy a dress or coat at a yard sale).
Back in the day, Ella and I hit the yard sales for us. We didn't need to worry about lead paint on furniture, drawers that wouldn't close, things that kids could swallow, and stuff like that. Our apartments and first home were Yard Sale Chic.
We were hardcore: we also hit auctions and flea markets. During one trip to a particular flea market, we started talking to the manager and he started telling us how much a room cost. One thing led to another and we left that day as renters of a room in a flea market.
It was a 16 X 10 space in an old grocery store but to us, it was a mansion. We put area rugs in it. We gave it a name and hung little signs all over the room. We made business cards because we could.
And we furnished it with some of the coolest stuff we could find.
The manager was a hippie who took a liking to us. While all the other dealers had to be present in order to sell things, he would open our booth on days we weren't there (the place was open Wednesday-Sunday) and sell our stuff for us. Even though we didn't need to be there, we were still there every Saturday and Sunday, hanging out and talking to the customers. It was probably the only time in my life that I was able to talk comfortably to strangers. It might have been the way we furnished it or maybe it was the college town clientele, but I just felt at home there. Most of the customers were professors, college students, or artsy-fartsy types. We always cut the college kids a deal because we knew what it was like to be young and not have much money.
After hitting the yard sales on Saturday mornings, we rushed down to the flea market to unload our new wares. Because both of us have an eye for this kind of stuff, after a month or so we had flea market groupies that were waiting for us when we got there, eager to be the first to see our new finds.
I weep when I think about how cheaply we marked our old gas signs, strange crucifixes, and other knickknacks and oddities due to the limited customer base in those pre-eBay days (or at least in the days before eBay became EBAY).
And then we found our niche.
One day we bought a particle-board bookcase at a yard sale. It was a piece of crap, so I told Ella we should paint it all funky and see what happens. We took it down to the flea market the next weekend and put it on display, unpriced. Within thirty minutes, we had someone offer us $50 for it.
Ca-ching!
We soon sought out cheap bookcases, tables, chairs, and other furniture during our yard sale trips. We would pick up a video at Blockbuster and paint all night long. We had so much fun painting, watching movies, talking, and coming up with new ideas. We painted zebra stripes, lady bug patterns, abstract crap, whatever came to mind. Sometimes we added objects to our furniture. My favorite thing we ever created was a taxi cab bookcase. We found an old sign from the top of a taxi at a yard sale, mounted it on top of a bookcase, and painted the bookcase yellow with a little checkerboard pattern down the sides.
I wish we had held onto that thing.
One day, a dentist came into our store and bought out our entire inventory of painted furniture to furnish his office (I still have trouble believing he actually put our crap in his office, but that's what he told us). We even started taking requests. People would tell us what they wanted, pay us up front, and we called them when it was ready.
Life was fun. Life was great.
But before it could turn into a full-fledged Violent Femmes tune, Ric "To be The Man, you gotta beat the man" Flair bought the property from the hippie's father and turned it into a Gold's Gym.
Woooo this, asshole.
Song of the day: Flea Market by Bracket
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