I went for three reasons:

• pure curiosity, having never been to such an event before
• as a source of still life props for my side interest in food photography
• good old fashioned male bonding with my brother-in-law (don’t ask me why, but he loves that sort of thing)

Saturday’s event has an interesting mix of attendees and goods for sale. There are attic and estate cleaners selling “used product”. Brand new merchandise that fell off the back of a truck, if you follow. And let’s not forget food. Lots and lots of food. Baked goods. Canned goods.  Funnel cakes. Smoked meat. Dried… something, best not to ask.

And the flea market is a market in the purist Adam Smith sense of the word. There is haggling, pressure selling, and “value based pricing” all under one roof.  Supply meets demand on equal footing. All attendees, no matter their status in life, come to the flea market for a good deal. Wandering the marketplace, I was intrigued by snippets of different transactions I overheard in passing. Some booths had a clearly defined process with merchandise with conspicuous pricing, arranged in an attractive display. Then, there were merchants that had their goods laid out in a haphazard heap with no indication whatsoever of price. Buyers were haggling with sellers, and sellers were touting the value of there items. “See,” I heard one woman tell her mark customer, “this is pure silver and not stainless steel.” What I found most interesting is that the less organized a vendor appeared to be, the busier they were. Folks seemed to flock to the disorganized sections of the market believing good deals could be had there.

Disorganization as a Sales Tactic
I’m a sales guy. I’m also, dare I say, a fairly organized guy. I don’t sort my T-shirts by color, but I do take the time to fold them all the same way. So, organized but not OCD. The organizational prowess of the folks raking it in at the flea market made me cringe — but didn’t change the fact that they were the one’s raking it in. They were selling used goods: old books, cds, dvds, electronics, games, etc. Most of this merchandise was pulled from house clean up jobs and estate sales. Or maybe their neighbors’ curbs, for all I could tell.

Technology as a Purchasing Advantage
As a buyer, the hardest thing in such an environment is knowing an item’s true value. Unless you stumble across something you have history with from a price perspective, it’s difficult to gauge what it might be worth. Fortunately for me, my brother-in-law has a secret weapon that helps him find the value of items at the market: his PDA and a small UPC wand reader. If the item has a UPC code, he can pull its value on the spot using a database and the Internet. A very cool trick I saw only him using.

How We Did
My brother-in-law was able to identify multiple items that he could expect a 10x to 20x return on. Which is awesome. From an investment perspective, were you to just buy items blindly and hope for the best (or, worse, trust your intuition), your returns would quickly turn negative. My brother-in-law demonstrated this to me with his device and knowledge of the items he buys regularly. It was interesting to see items at the market selling for $2 where the actual value was only .33 or .10 cents. Some of the used product vendors at the flea market clearly used technology behind the scenes and knew the value of their items. It was evident in the fact that none of their items would yield a return if bought and then resold.

We went through a similar process in the new merchandise section, but the better deals were really in the used section, at least from the perspective of yielding a return by reselling anything we bought. All in all, it was a good day. I tried something new and earned new respect for my brother-in-law, watching him mine the market for deals. And I got a lovely cast iron skillet I’ll totally be able to use for an upcoming shoot. Technology, the Internet, and pricing strategy is everywhere. Even at the flea market.