Car boot sale.

[biggs682]

i enjoy them and have found a few cycling related bargains over the years including a few complete bikes , today we went to a local one and for the 2nd time recently same old boy selling a nice old Dawes road bike , made him a cheeky offer on first lap and wa

 

[Mandragora]

i enjoy them and have found a few cycling related bargains over the years including a few complete bikes , today we went to a local one and for the 2nd time recently same old boy selling a nice old Dawes road bike , made him a cheeky offer on first lap and wa

What??? What happened??? Did he take your cheeky offer? You can't leave us in suspense...


Anyway, I like a car boot sale, as a customer - though it's hard to resist the call of tat, I manage, and have had some great deals over the years, which I won't bore you with here.

We have an attic full of 'stuff' that was put to one side last year when we sorted the accumulated junk out up there, so we're now girding our loins to get rid of it in the next couple of weeks. The only threat motivational speech I can offer to the OH, who is even less inspired than me is that it needs to go, and come the late autumn he's going to have two choices, if we don't car boot it now. These are:

• List and sell it on fleabay. It'll need to go at 5 items a week to balance sanity against 'get rid of the ruddy stuff, get it out of the house'. It'll be Himself who has to do it, as he's retired and I have to go to work. He will hate every second of it, other than the final moments of any auction.

or

• Take it to the charity shop. As Mr 'That's worth something, that is. I'm not throwing that away; I'm not just giving it away, you know', that would positively kill him.

At the moment, he's just refusing to discuss it, which I'm taking as a sign that he's about to admit defeat; we may just bite the bullet and get it done before we go away in a couple of weeks.

Oh - and to make £55 of money in your hand (yes, yes, minus expenses) you'd need to make another tenner or so at work to clear £55, if that cheers you up at all.... As long as you're getting rid of genuine 'personal and surplus to requirements' stuff, it's not (yet) taxable, I believe

 

[Dayvo]

I've just bought a mobility scooter

The least you could have done would have been to buy an motor-driven recumbent, to retain a bit of street credibility:

 

[tyred]

I've never done one but my observations tell me that many people that do go and sell whatever they took with them and then go around the other stalls and fill the car back up again so are back where they started!

 

[Globalti]

Having done a few, here are two tales about car boot sales:

Firstly, there's an interesting contrast between punters from different ethnic groups: You have an old nick nack on your stall. An elderly English lady wanders along, picks it up, examines it with interest then looks up and asks: "How much?" "Fifty pence!" you reply. The English lady pays and wanders off happy as Larry with her cheap purchase.

An elderly Asian lady picks up the nick-nack. "How much?" she asks. "Fifty pence!" you reply. "Thirty!" she riposts. "Okay, thirty is fine!" you sigh. She fumbles in her pocket then proffers a coin: "I've only got twenty pence!" "Fine," you reply. "Twenty pence will do!" She takes the nick-nack, then comes the back-breaker: "Have you got a bag?"

Secondly, we once went to a massive Sunday CBS at Trafford Park, Manchester, which was ghastly. I had two old Scout sheath knives on the stall and a security bloke came over and explained that under local by-laws knives were not allowed. Fine, I took them off the stall and put them under the car seat. Ten minutes later a different security bloke wandered up with a sweater over his uniform, the epaulettes clearly visible in shape. He explained that he and his wife collect knives and would love to buy the ones he had heard I had. For a minute I almost complied but I smelled a rat and the more I hesitated the more he insisted, and the more the alarm bells rang in my mind. I refused and he stalked off looking unhappy. The more I thought about it the more I suspected that I'd just escaped a very crap attempt to entrap me for a scalp - I could just hear the smug git giving evidence at the Magistrate's Court the following Monday: "He was told that the sale of knives was illegal yet ten minutes later he sold two knives to a uniformed security officer!"

 

[Sandra6]

We've done a few in the past, usually in between babies when we didn't think we'd have need for all the paraphernalia again.
Best profit was £150 worst was when all we made was a tenner.

 

[coffeejo]

Having done a few, here are two tales about car boot sales:

Firstly, there's an interesting contrast between punters from different ethnic groups: You have an old nick nack on your stall. An elderly English lady wanders along, picks it up, examines it with interest then looks up and asks: "How much?" "Fifty pence!" you reply. The English lady pays and wanders off happy as Larry with her cheap purchase.

An elderly Asian lady picks up the nick-nack. "How much?" she asks. "Fifty pence!" you reply. "Thirty!" she riposts. "Okay, thirty is fine!" you sigh. She fumbles in her pocket then proffers a coin: "I've only got twenty pence!" "Fine," you reply. "Twenty pence will do!" She takes the nick-nack, then comes the back-breaker: "Have you got a bag?"

I've done several myself and my observations suggest that there's no link between race and the desire/ability to barter.

 

[biggs682]

What??? What happened??? Did he take your cheeky offer? You can't leave us in suspense...QUOTE]

no he didnt take the cheeky offer and by the time i decided to go for his price he had gone home

 

[classic33]

Its like everything else, isn't it? The actual thing itself isn't the problem, its the people!

When you know that some of the prices being "asked for" are higher than the bought new price, and the seller expects that as a minimum.

 

[SD1]

FREECYCLE. Your crap which has no value to you or on eBay is a God send to others. IE "wanted computer for children to do homework"
No way I could sell the one I had replaced so I gave it to them. They emailed me a year later to thank me again as it was an excellent computer.......maybe it was better than I thought! Damn!