SHIPSHEWANNA

I went to Shipshewanna with Tammy and a friend from our flea market here in town. It was really a long day, Tuesday. I was up before five am and we left Fort Wayne by 6. Shipshewanna is a 60 mile trip, we got there at 7:10....then had to wait until after 8 before we even knew if we'd get a space. Finally, at 8:30 they called our name.

I don't like the way they're doing it this year. We were setting up our booth while customers were pouring in. We didn't get everything set up until 10:30...who knows how many sales we could have made in that two and half hours. I bet a thousand people went by...I finally went over and started selling our scented salt crystals while Tammy and Annie finished up. In years past the spaces were given out at 7 and we had an hour to get set up before customers arrived.

We sold enough to make our expenses and some extra to replace stock we were low on. I keep hearing vendors boasting about taking in $1,000 to 1500 a day. That's not us! This t-shirt booth near us was selling t-shirts for $1.97 each...nice quality, plain, colored shirts. They had thousands of them and probably sold a thousand or more. Annie took 28 tiffany-type lamps...she sold three. A booth down the aisle had a couple hundred just like hers, but in three sizes...she only had the large lamp, selling it for $25...a good bargain. But the other booth was doing a brisk business, selling the smaller lamps for $17.

All the booths that were selling a lot...had products marked cheap. We know how they do it...we just don't have the money for the initial investment. Like the t-shirt guy....he bought a truck load of shirts...at fifty cents to a dollar each. The truck load cost him probably $5,000, but I bet he's gone through a couple of truck loads since May 5, when the flea market opened.

Another booth close to us had signs proclaiming everything was $5 or less. They were selling purses, totes, wallets, backpacks, insulated lunch bags, socks...and other like stuff. Their mark-up couldn't have been more than fifty cents to a dollar...but they tent was constantly full of customers. She told me she had to call and have two more people come in to work for her because she and her daughter couldn't handle it.

That seems to be the secret to making money at a flea market. Buy huge quantities and sell them cheap. A dollar mark up isn't much, but multiply it by a 1,000 sales and it adds up. The customer profits by getting it much cheaper than even at Walmart or Dollar General.

Tammy and I could do that with our scented salt crystals. We could sell it for a dollar profit and probably sell 500 to 1,000 bags...but we don't have the inventory to sell that much nor the capital to buy that much. Not to mention, we don't have a truck to transport that much inventory. All the big sellers bring in huge trucks loaded down...we take ours in a small van!

Back to our week. Or my one day. We took maybe a hundred crocheted towels...and they were flying off the rack. People were buying four or more at a time. I'm going to be crocheting towels all summer! This is one item we don't make a big profit on, perhaps a dollar per towel. Since it takes me half an hour to make one, I'm working cheap!

We've added Shea butter to our stock of products. We sold a few...not a lot. But we were selling ours for $4 for a two-ounce jar. Just down the aisle, a booth was getting $10 for the same size jar.! But where we had a small display of it...maybe 40 jars...he had a whole booth dedicated to it...hundreds of jars of different sizes.

I felt like a carnival barker. As people would walk by, I'd say..."hey, have you seen this scented salt crystals?" Nine out of ten would then stop and look and maybe half of them would listen to my sales spiel and once in awhile, someone would actually buy.

It started raining about 3 and people rushed out. It was okay with me, I was done! My body ached all over and I could barely stand up. I left for home a little after four...Tammy and Annie had to stay until the market closed at five. That's probably the only day this summer I'll be able to go up there, because once the heat and humidity set in, I can't take it.

It was easier, though, than working our booth at the local flea market. We don't get many customers there, so only one of work at a time...and have to cover the whole booth. I can't sit down and talk to customers there. Saturday, Tammy had to go to Indy and pick up her daughter at the airport...so I had to work from 9 to six...and it was hard!! And I only took in $20.

There is money to be made in the flea market business, but we're not making it. We barely make enough to cover our expenses, but it gives us something to do. It is more a hobby, so far, for us than a business. Yet, we have hopes that it will get better.