Economy & Business: Bug-Eyed over Flea Markets

Buyers have the itch; dealers get some scratch

As many as 15,000 bargain hunters cram the market’s six acres each weekend, rummaging through wares displayed at 400 stalls, haggling with sellers and walking away with treasures—and junk—of every description. Fuzzy stuffed animals and live parrots. Miniature Japanese pagodas and bonsai trees. Madonna and child statuettes. Sea shells and natural sponges. “This,” exults Mary Wright, “is the last bastion of free enterprise. My God, what a business it is!”

She is praising the enterprise that she and her husband run in Houston: a flea market, that most elementary form of commerce. All across the U.S., inflation-weary Americans searching for lower-priced goods are making flea markets a jumping business. Thousands are operating in non-luxe hotels and discount stores, at race tracks and drive-in theaters. Some are in cities, patterned after the grandfather of flea markets, the Marché aux Puces in Paris, and the ancient bazaars of Cairo, Baghdad and Tehran. Many, many more are sprouting on what were once dusty, barren plots along highways a few miles from city limits.

The biggest profits in flea markets are earned not by sellers but by the organizers who collect stall rentals and often modest gate entrance fees.

Sometimes the idea is just to salvage a going concern. Notes Bill Buchholz, who runs flea markets billed as “swap meets” at his Miami drive-in theater: “The quality of the movies is so poor and the cost of getting them so high, I’d go right out of business without the swap meets.” Quite a few flea markets are still fleabags, but the institution has taken on enough respectability that the U.S. Economic Development Administration has funded Washington, D.C.’s first permanent flea market.

Though growing larger than ever, flea markets still allow anyone with an eye to sharp trading to go into business almost instantly. All a would-be proprietor has to do is rent a modest stall or table, for $4 to $20 a day. Then the fun begins: people display an incredible array of items pulled from closets, attics, gardens, in-laws and, only occasionally, outlaws. With an eye for hot merchandise, police sometimes patrol the bigger markets, but the difficulty of making positive identifications means that there is often little they can do to knock down any fences.

The stalls typically are filled with a smorgasbord designed to appeal to every taste, from used goods to discounted, discontinued lines of new merchandise. Aficionados claim that the larger markets offer one of everything ever made and two of everything Woolworth ever sold. There are Army uniforms, ladies’ spats, metal detectors, Roosevelt buttons, Wallace buttons, Nixon buttons, toilet seats, hubcaps, ski boots, gum ball machines, telephones, dried fruit, perfumes, crutches, jump ropes and Christian Dior shirts.

A sample of the prices and pitches at New Jersey’s Englishtown Auction Sales, the largest flea market in the mid-Atlantic region: $3.75 for a solid leather belt (“Why pay a buck for a bonded belt that will become brittle and broken?”); a still-to-be-dickered price for a potbellied-stove door (“When you need it, you need it”); $1.75 for a goldfish (“You get the bowl, you get the sand, you get the fish, you get two weeks’ supply of fish food”). Says Steve Sobechko, who owns the Englishtown market: “It’s a great recycling place.”

Flea markets thrive on nostalgia. Explains Susan Pressly, a New York City nurse and a frequent visitor to New Jersey’s Lambertville Antique Flea Market: “You can go there and touch something from your childhood.” When Shirley Temple ruled moviedom in the ’30s, small blue drinking glasses bearing her pixie face were packed in countless Wheaties boxes. The glasses now fetch $9 each at MacSonny’s flea market in North Reading, Mass. Anything old sells: wedding dresses, shoes, and, for collectors, Coca-Cola signs, beer cans and comic books. Says Bill McCrenice, an antique-store owner and a frequent seller at Atlanta’s “1-85” drive-in market: “I bring things that aren’t good enough for the store.”

A flea market’s weekend often starts just after midnight—at 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. Saturday, when sellers begin to set out their wares. As early as 4 a.m., professional buyers start to appear. Many are dealers looking for bargains that they will resell at sharply marked-up prices. By early morning the casual crowds start swarming in, and then the haggling begins.

A carnival air brightens California’s San Jose market, one of the biggest in the U.S., with its 130 acres attracting 2.5 million visitors annually. Crowds pushing shopping carts stroll through the grounds, consuming heroic quantities of junk food and observing the outlandish garb that customers wear as part of the ritual. Henry Cortez, a robust Mexican American, sports a huge straw hat and tows Grandson Douglas around in a wooden wagon. “This is my flea-market hat,” says Cortez, who has been going to the San Jose market almost every weekend since 1960. “And this is my flea-market wagon. I come to visit people.”

Most sellers appear to do well, though a few earn barely enough to cover rental charges. Mrs. Priscilla Bandzin of Boston routinely sells at one market what she earlier bought at another; last New Year’s Day she cleared $165. Jon Watson supplements his income as an assistant professor at the University of Houston by hawking plants from his van and earns $300 to $600 a weekend. Some dealers have become increasingly professional, jumping from markets in the Northeast in spring and summer to those in the South in winter. At the San Jose market, the more enterprising sell as much as $70,000 annually.

Big money, however, is not the goal of most marketeers. Like the Hollywood stars—Lucille Ball, Barbra Streisand, Suzanne Somers and Redd Foxx—who are chauffeured to the flea market at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, they are having fun, wheeling and dealing away an afternoon. ∙