Weekend fleemarket - fundraising for the kids - day 2

Last day of our fleemarket weekend - see my earlier posts on the Friday preparation and the Saturday crazy frenzy

I didn't take many photos today, slept a bit too long so it was a bit of a stress in the morning. I was quite surprised that the opening today was ... calm and quiet. The first person arriving to the electrics walked slowly into the department, no rush and not so much chaos. My son was at one point dragging my arm, one person had put a cable into his pocket. I ran after him and confronted him with it ... so eventually I got paid. I felt a bit silly, because it was a SCART-cable, we have lots and lots of them, so for me it was quite worthless, so just asked for the ordinary price for the not-so-valuable cables - 5 NOK. Quite much fuzz for not so much money. Still, theft is quite unacceptable!

Those pictures are from the end of the fleemarket. Most of the things at the left side of the classroom is gone.

Quite many scanners and printers left. Some VHS-players, DVD-players, LP-player etc left. I'm surprised nobody was asking for an LP-player, usually they do disappear.

On earlier fleemarkets we've had the time, equipment and expertise to test quite much of the stuff, particularly the music players. This time and the previous time we got sold pretty much everything that could play music independently - like boomplasters, FM-radios with built-in loudspeakers (despite the FM senders being mostly turned off in Norway), tape players with loudspeakers, even a walkman. I think "old-fashioned" stereo equipment are on the way out, nowadays one can often get quite decent music from just a cellphone and some small loudspeakers, there just is no need for a big player at home with different audio sources, big amplifier and big loudspeakers. Though, some people still collect on old items of "good" brands, like there was a Tandberg tape player being sold yesterday.

In the lamp section, it's still quite much left. We get quite many lamps in every year, many of them are quite nice, but there aren't too many buyers. We get sold some though. It may be important with a big selection, lamp-buyers are usually not just looking for any lamp, they need to find the right lamp.

The hanging lamps ... really a lot of work hanging them up, and I think I sold only one of them ... for quite a low price, even.

Eventually everyone had a small common coffee- and cake break from the cleaning work. There was quite many cakes left.

The container to the left is the stuff we'll keep for the one next flee market. I take most of the cables, power supplies and lamp bulbs (not very valuable, but takes relatively small place, and being able to find the right cable or power supply may be immensely valuable when customers want to verify things are working before they buy it. I also take out the nicest of the lamps, we kept the LP-player and a VHS-player. Who knows, people who are sitting on old home-made VHS tapes may feel a need for saving them for the future, digitalizing them ... to do so, it's needed with a VHS-player, and you just can't buy one in the shop those days.

Here are some containers with things we keep for the next flee market in the autumn. In general, we throw much more than we keep at the end of the day. It's quite crazy to see how many nice things are going to the thrash at the end of the day. This time we managed to fill two garbage containers totally up, and still we had much garbage left (we had ordered more capacity, so eventually we'll get another container tomorrow).

In the end I had to put in one and one book to fill the container completely up.

At my first fleemarket, it was terrible to see how many nice things that are going directly to the thrash. One gets used to it after a while. One thing I console myself with is that for every nice item going to the thrash, we've probably sold ten nice items - and quite much of the things going to the thrash is, after all, just thrash.

It's a fine line, what is to be regarded a "success", selling as much as possible, or earning as much money as possible? For quite some of my colleagues, profit maximizing is the obvious answer, but I also consider it a success when the classroom is almost empty at the end of the day. While my colleagues often would say "no" if someone asks for something that will anyway go to the thrash for a far too low price (or even for free), I'm happy to see as much as possible going out the door in the end of the day. Except, things I see worthy to keep to the next flee market.

Well, the lamps ... it doesn't really help to sell the lamps cheaply, people usually either want a lamp or don't want a lamp, and they usually don't have much of an export or resale value.

All photos available in better resolution on IPFS QmXvQ5aMmpPYfHhdB3urDZq6PsJPcm5nNq74spq41gXnEX. License: CC BY-SA 4.0