Sunday, June 09, 2013

Semi-Success As A Salesperson

I did pretty well selling trade paperbacks and graphic novels yesterday at the Hamilton Park festival flea market, but selling anything else was a disaster. This just wasn't the venue to ask for a decent price. I had one gorgeous handmade skirt from Barcelona which a smart shopper snapped up for twenty bucks, but the average conversation went something like this:

"What size are those brand-new Dansko clogs?"

"They're 8.5, but they're a little bit big for me. Do you want to try then on? I never wore them out of the house."

(Customer tries them on, they fit.)

"How much?"

"Ten dollars," I say, wincing since I probably spent $80 and thought they fit until they actually didn't and the return window was over.

"Oh," shocked look like they've touched raw sewage. Shoes go back on table fast as lightning.

You don't want to know the reaction to me asking for $20 for a bag I'd made on my kitchen table.

But I unloaded a lot of comic books, mostly because I priced them ludicrously low, low enough that some people were like HELL YEAH. I made them two for $5, five for $10. And most of them had never been read. Well, none of them had been read. I found these in the office before our last move, put them in the storage unit, then recently cleaned this out and threw them in the back of my car, not sure what to do with them.

I still have two long boxes of graphic novels, but the other two and the moldy Masterworks are gone (the Masterworks into the trash).

I'm going to re-think selling the other stuff. I might be able to get a table at a crafts fair.




1 comment:

Jose Marzan Jr. said...

I guess people at flea markets are the same like people who go to garage sales... Cheap! You say "50 cents", and they still try to haggle you down!