Never Turn Down Wine, Cheese, and Workable Electronics

My state is pushing to illegalize the dumping of recyclables such as clothing. Not a pleasant notion. Preventing retrievable items from overpopulating a landfill is sound–you can salvage valuable material and fetch a profit while precluding safety hazards; landfills leak into water tables and all that. The materials in electronics notwithstanding, you shouldn’t throw them away unless they no longer work.

I wish to sell spare electronics–nothing spectacular, just usable, useful, or interesting things–the odd gaming mouse here, the functioning wide-screen LCD television there. So, Google Lens, an impressive photographic identification tool that any sensible human being should use in merchandise research, lets you verify an object’s secondhand value. “How valuable?” you ask. Here’s the deal: in both the co-op and Sunday venues, I am adjacent to an electronics-oriented dealer–one versed in console games, the other primarily in computers. The former is a lot more specialized, which is the model for my own series of booths that present literature to the public. The latter sprawls and encompasses jewelry, statues, and other curiosa, resulting in a far more unkempt presentation, deterring easy sales. Believe me when I say I am more often tempted into impulse buys at the first than in the second, though impulse buys happen and I know the latter guy more, anyway.

Google Lens lets you compare prices and conduct rudimentary market research, assuming the picture you take resembles the many others that try to capture an equivalent object. I never charge much. I try to posit a fair price as encouraged by the co-op’s owner, or keep it on on or below eBay’s prices, knowing full well their vendors add shipping and handling charges. You should not pay inflated prices at the co-op if you are also required to drive down a dangerous sloping driveway and risk a traffic accident on one of the busiest highways in the Commonwealth.

If everyone’s booth looks clean and inviting with obvious specialties, maybe items will sell quicker. When considering a way around the lack of presentation at the Sunday venue, I considered my neighbors in the equation. I thought, “What if I liquidated some vendors’ costume jewelry to allow space that could be used on electronics?” After all, knowing a vendor will sell one kind of merchandise might make it a little more organized and generate sales by slicker presentation. The oddities on his shelves have not moved quickly off shelves.

But no, it won’t operate quite like that. The sellers, a motley bunch in the best of days, must be on board. They already squealed with scathing scrutiny over the possibility of the owners wanting to open on Saturdays as they fear it will double rent costs for a day not habitually known for flea marketing (Saturdays are better suited to yard sales). So, getting them to parse merch by vendor is a ludicrous undertaking. Also, booths become messy for good reasons. For the argument, I cite two: commuting from Maine for one, or showing up in the afternoon for another (not mutually exclusive, but factors when you don’t live in the town or even in the same county). The third is that the dealer is sometimes elderly.

Further still, consider secondhand marketing. Even the tightest sellers know how customers’ perusal and browsing cannot feel “worth the time” if the price is too high. Nobody expects to behold “JUST THE THING I’M LOOKING FOR!”, either. I do make a conscious effort to present things they do find and love at minor pittances, not just out of kindness to the buyer as to give off positive vibes and encourage sales at other booths (they’ll have cash to spare). This alone forges a bond–if you’re not stingy, the customer has no justification for being stingy, too.

The other facet is the baseline interaction I have experienced at the in-person venue. Often, I must redirect even repeat customers to whatever other booth does, in fact, sell baseball trading cards. In the same breath, I redirect people to either the outside port-o-potties (for customers) or point to the keymaster for the interior’s bathrooms adjacent to my spot (for vendors); I’m the first guy anyone sees, after all. This level of interaction, rote and banal as it is with minimal payoff, requires me to play ambassador or greeter to the interior in question, a place that gets little love from outsiders, not the least of all because people are surprised we even have concessions, let alone adjacent interior booths.

While you can buy and sell random electronic wires online through the net’s power to sort through search queries at rapid speed, you still need to arrange for deliveries. Being no stickler for the particulars of their logistics, I shy away. I imagine taking pictures in advance, then putting items into packages, and then shipping them out after an order is place with an appropriately printed label. I wouldn’t get too hung up from combining items together into one package. Even with this in mind, I am but one dude and have something akin to a life. I already engage in lesser drudgery than sorting through, cleaning and wrapping items–I have even less time from merely pondering upon it.

With this tug-of-war over how to best render the business efficiently as possible while servings its two main purposes (help others and make cash, one and zero priority respectively), I always wonder if I’m the only one in the room who thinks that specializing in one product, say literature, is advantageous. It runs against the excitement of flea marketing as its conceit is finding things you never expect amid a pile of rubble.

It may be true for the slapdash presentation of the Sunday outing, but the co-op stresses presentation so people don’t dig through a booth, dragging every vendor’s reputation down as a consequence. Finding something interesting should not take so much effort that you’re less in a mood to consider purchasing it. Thus, I do not (even if I wanted to) sell spare video games and electronics at the co-op since I’m adjacent to one that sells console games and does so quite well. If I wanted in on the action, I would need to sell a different variety of games for any real chance and at prices already in place between the two of us. And I don’t deal in big box PC games–something he hasn’t quite cornered the market on but is beyond my ken besides.

Back to the electronics vendor at the Sunday fair, who does his own recycling: he sells towers. PC towers! Carve out the outdated, undesired or flat-out damaged/destroyed hardware and you have a cheap, practical blank canvas to build upon. Either strip her down and retro-fit with new hardware or utilize as is (given an updated software suite and replacement parts). Put some effort and skill on display well before trying to buy a new tower. Right now, the industry, spurred on by Raspberry Pi and such, is veering toward mini-machines that cannot accommodate standard motherboards and graphics processors. The ancient wisdom remains viable and will drop in price. Nobody can afford extraneous purchases anymore than we ever required “RGB”, the absurd visual flourishes that add to your light bill and negate any benefit of a warmer-toned monitor display at night–a fad that should not weather another decade’s time as of this post’s initial release. Unless it’s followed by the word “drive”, never vie for “flash”.

To grab neophytes, normies, and nerds alike, however, he also sells laptops he has refurbished himself, fetched from corporate stock that sees limited use and gets replaced every five years. Laptops are made for transit and, as a consequence, never as rugged as desktops for servers or graphics processing. Overheating and tricky maintenance abound. Why even take every program with you at once? You have a pocket computer, right? They call them “mobile (cellular tele)phones”, which use proprietary apps and a somewhat limited interface–you may require voice-over or slim fingers for its touchpad–that cannot compete with keyboard and mouse once acclimated. Even rudimentary prototypes sport a text parser for jotting down ideas and facts on the go.

Mobile phones are best with simple tasks like taking calls and text, or to schedule events in a calendar app (my favorite application, might I add). It surpasses laptops’ primary conceit unless you factor in complex applications as programming. Skipping middle-child-syndrome-personified tablets, laptops can facilitate live power-point presentations and play DVDs (or respective .ISOs, drive space permitting). Desktops are just stationary versions of all three, powering through legitimate hobbyist gaming and server work far better than any of the previous formats put together.

So, he sells laptops. For what it’s worth, they run well; make sure you use the right power adaptor to avoid screwy performance and fire hazards. Normies appreciate them for their balanced performance and price. Not a cost-effective option for building a server though. Hence, his desktop towers interest me more. He sells these to DIY types, or uses them to build custom orders. Several line the top shelves of his booths (you rent 10’*10′ segments of interior space per week or a reduced rate per month). Making him cough several up at wholesale prices for my future makeshift server farm to offset yearly site-hosting costs demands negotiating savvy.

However, I can probably seal the deal by helping him clean out a booth space and consolidate merchandise into a slimmer setup, dialing back his own overhead expenses in the long term. It may encourage dealers to open shop nearby or let another vendor expand, stirring up the interior layout and catching the eyes of foot traffic. I extend my courtesy of volunteering to all vendors, cleaning glass cases and offering the odd shelf or thematic merch free of charge. This is the Turnip Economy, where simple favors are the only real currency and the kindness alone keeps spirits floating over recessions and lockdowns. Better to be a nosy neighbor than a curmudgeon cutthroat, anti-trust laws notwithstanding.

So, you want to recycle? Get serious. Reduce and reuse instead. And better still, waste not, want not. This flea market business hammers these unshakable truths into your psyche. Other things to watch out for are the glasses you can clean out and present at your booth a little better. You’ve seen them, haven’t you? They sell old bottles, punctuating their age with how much gunk is inside. I suppose they don’t want to scratch off the label and reduce its value, like trying to scrub grime from antique coins.

My take is that I have a whole section dedicated to glasses. Some guys come along and use ultraviolet lights to confirm their elemental composition, like finding a wine glass with traces of uranium. So, I try to buy those at a killer price, wash them, display them, and let the vendors put something different there instead. Strewn-About costume jewelry and bookshelves full of (computer) mice–little things that are hard to display when crammed into buckets of seeming junk. I can take those off your hands so you could put something there you want to display.

The point is, my proposal transcends monetary value and imagines product entering customers’ hands even faster. The utilization of limited Space, always at a premium, makes all the difference. If recycling generally wastes more money and energy than it can ever preserve the environment, reduce and reuse instead. If what you find here provides an alternative to purchasing hosting space at $800 per three years roundabouts, without having to purchase terminally modern fare at exorbitant prices, then you’re far ahead of the curve (and grip the curves) than the tech you’re brandishing to accomplish it.

Search for opportunities to slice costs and learn new things about maintaining technology. After all, I can see that you are already well-skilled.

Good hunting.