Finally found out what exactly is happening at Rosebowl Fleamarket…

Well certainly from my soldiers on the ground, thank you to Ben and Jim for your diligence in finding this information out for me.

It seems that I really should have taken up smoking and lit up when I received the letter and replacement tickets in the mail from RGC Shows! It looks like my 40 foot of frontage by 20 foot deep is not going to be 40 foot of frontage by 18 foot deep as they implied with their letter!

What it looks like is that my 40 foot of frontage is just 20 foot of frontage and 18 foot deep. Trouble is, the vehicle that I use is 21 foot long, that gives me a mere MINUS ONE FOOT of space to get my 1950’s furnishing etc out of the back of the vehicle and less than 1/3 of the previous space I had for displaying my product! Not only that, I no longer have my corner location so effectively I lose another 10 foot of frontage that I paid the extra.

Ben and Jim described the marking for the space as being a single space with the two space numbers marked one above the other, now if they are going to build a second floor to the space then I guess I would get that space but somehow I don’t think so. The spaces are marked

XXXX
YYYY

This means that I am paying $210 for a space that anyone else would previously have paid $90, while a fellow Seller is paying $120 for the same space size that would have cost $90, while there are others that are still receiving the same space for $80 that they paid for previously.

This Sunday, 12th February I will know for sure what the situation is and won’t just be speculation! I know that I will be rather upset and will have questions to ask the Staff at Canning Shows at the show and I guess that I may have to go through the Small claims court to make myself whole financially if the way the space is marked is actually correct and I am been screwed of a big chunk of my selling space.

Update

Well lucky me…

…I was lucky enough to get my double space, the area was remarked and the old markings blacked out but…

… They made a charge for the May tickets equivalent to two corner spaces! So I sent te morning talking them on the phone and pointed out the charges for the new location would remain the same according to their letter and it’s bad enough being charged for a premium corner location but then to be charged another $30 for the inline section of my double space. He made an excuse and said that there was a mistake made during the switch to the new location but the price was correct on the tickets sent through the mail to replace the cancelled locations!

Changes are afoot Dr Watson!

Sherlock Holmes make have said the very same if they had received the two letters I received today from RG Canning shows.

We are a victim of the construction work being carried out at the Rose bowl at Pasadena, California! Our double space has been swallowed completely by the building work.

They say it is just for the next two years, and then we may get our spaces back if the location is still available!

Some how I am suspicious of the word ‘temporary’ simply because most times that means permanent!

The locations that I received are numbered with a gap between them, that worries me, the sale point of the corner space and a middle space next to it is because the length of our vehicle precludes having middle spaces. We don’t always fill the two spaces simply because of the consequence of using a single large vehicle, we can fit in to the vehicle enough to fill the area that two vehicles would fill but not enough space for the vacant area that the missing vehicle would take up. Our cargo van sits squarely in the 20 foot of the space so if we are restricted to a single space to locate the truck then we can fit in but cannot get items in and out of the cargo van, lol.

I did phone them and questIon the locations and whether I would have both spaces together and the customer service person was really vague and put me through to the guy in charge, I haven’t heard back from them, I left a message and was hoping to find out.

After our family selling at Rosebowl flea market for the past 25+ years this could be the deciding factor about dropping the show and finding a new venue that is cheaper to travel to and where I can have a shorter selling day and cheaper booth fees.

Customer service!

Really eBay, you strive to force sellers offer a premium customer service experience but when it comes to giving YOUR CUSTOMERS good service you stink!

Your site has been not working on and off for the most of today, I thought I might be the only one with this issue but wait….

…there were others complaining. Though when I went to reply to one and say that it was not just them even their discussion forums went down and have been down ever since.

I phoned eBay after it took me over an hour to deal with a single transaction, missed catching the outgoing mail and delaying the dispatch until tomorrow for the customers purchase. Normally I can complete a transaction from point of payment to going out the door in a few minutes, usually less than five minutes!

The first person I spoke to was rude and refused to listen and promptly hung up on me rather than deal with my issue. I phone back and then get through to India, I go round in circles and she says she was placing a service ticket (somehow I doubt she did), So after 2 hours on the phone, a cell phone, I finally give up. Still at 8.40pm Their service is still patchy, at least I can get to selling manager though I produced a shipping label with it and it crashed out on me after eBay had taken the money. I lucked out and managed to select to reprint from their label history but it angers me.

The second person I spoken to refused to acknowledge my question,

“How does eBay expect sellers to give premium customer service when eBay not given premium service got their customer, the seller?”

I don’t know about others but it is a real insult to sellers to have to deal with shoddy service, ever increasing indirect fees from eBay and more pressures to offer a premium service, much higher expected standards than even eBay offer themselves and while sellers worked their backsides off in the preChristmas rush to avoid being flagged by eBay for shoddy service the big retailers failed dismally.

Please eBay, hold the sellers to the service level that you offer the sellers, better still hold the sellers to the service level that companies like Best Buy gave to customers at Christmas. How many sellers cancelled orders because they were out of stock, then take off the sellers that are big box sellers that you give special lips to backside service to that defaulted on their customers and you will find that your small sellers gave the best service on the Internet!

Pet Peeves when selling in an Antique Mall

I wonder how many of you sellers make their sales through Antique Malls, I operate numerous booths of various sizes through a single Antique Mall in Southern California. Now I am willing to put up with many things, people can call me every name they can think of under the sun, they can spread gossip about my private life and make stories up to fill in what they don’t know, and they don’t really know anything at all because my private life stays private, except of course my thoughts and comments about buying and selling that I post on here, as you have noticed though I don’t really enter into details of myself or my private life.

It takes a lot to get me to tipping point where I finally lose control. Well here’s a story of the one time I really lost it with another dealer.

I took in a couple of pieces of furniture to replace sold furniture into the mall. I tidy up the booths and make them look at least presentable, I then go round and tidy up the other booths that I operate, giving them a quick clean etc.

I walk back to the rear of the store and happen to look down and on one of the pieces of furniture I had just put in and piled on top of this furniture was product from another booth. I had just gotten through taking the misplaced products back to their rightful booths and since the furniture was not in the store until I carried over the threshold of the store that morning like a groom carrying his new bride over the door of their first home!

I was so angry, I went down and had to walk round and calm down, My anger level was off the scale. I we still so pissed at it, not just because the only dealers in the store were the dealers that every calls the crazies but because they stood there waiting for me to find it and when I looked round and they had their shit eating grins on their faces laughing.

I calmed enough to go into the owners office and told him to fax the sales report to me and then finally lost my cool.

I told him that I have had their shit up to the eyeballs and I was sick Of their games, explained that this had gone on since before dad died and that I would tidy the booths and look round and find rap from other booths dumped or thrown where I had just cleaned and that it was only the crazies that were in the store and that this time it was blatantly obvious because they dumps it on something that I had only just brought into the store.

This is just one pet peeve, it drives me crazy, people should have the decency if they find something in their booth that belongs to another to take it to the correct booth, don’t dump it into another persons booths and don’t do just because you have an irrational hatred of someone.

You can tell that it made me angry, it took place on Monday morning and it is now Wednesday evening and I have just calmed enough to say something.

I made it my new year resolution to not put up with crap from others and stand up for myself! This is just a start, from now on I refuse to deal with people that I have either shirked away from or ignored it. Time to be strong and stand up to these people!

Another peeve from antique malls is when they don’t contact you when you sell large items or items of high value and then you arrive after traveling to the store only to find out that you will have to go home again and bring in a piece to fill the gap or spread out other pieces to make it look okay until you next come in. It is so frustrating.

Well off to continue calming down lol, thank you for letting me vent this, my single follower!

California packing peanuts law

Well as from tomorrow the sale of packing peanuts that are not made on recycled materials will be banned.

I only use biodegradable packaging peanuts. They tried to get me to use those inflated bags, well as much as I would love to use them since it would cut my packing weight but many of my products will pop the bags.

My supplier tried us on the recycled and the quality is just horrible, you get half a sack of crumbs and the peanuts are so hard that they cause as much damage as they protect from.

I will stick to the biodegradable until California finds a reason to outlaw those and when they do that I will leave California and go to a more relaxed state.

There should be ground rules!

Oh I wish that there would be ground rules for people that plan to hold a yard, garage, fake estate sale!

Today was craziness.

There was not many sales advertises, nothing special about that in December, especially a week or so before Christmas! What was really irritating was that of those that advertised all failed to open except for one and that was really an insult, advertised as an estate it was really some rather short Mexican people trying to sell what looked like their dirty unwashed laundry. More gross in person that it sounds written down.

I could have saved gasoline and stayed in bed.

If people advertise that they are going to do something and give a date, day and time and describe what they are selling then they should at least put a sign up saying cancelled so that you don’t drive back multiple times in case they revere running late.

If they advertise Estate Sale then make sure it really is an estate sale and not a yard sale or garage sale. Worse still, don’t be an antique dealer using an empty home that they are borrowing off a realtor to hold a fake estate with the items that they cannot shift from their stores, and if they really do that then price them at massive discount prices to clear them.

I actually read an angry posting on Craigslist about this very thing by a dealer local to me called Jim Nicastro who had went to one of these sales, arrived really early to be first in line, waited all morning and then became upset because everything had antique store stickers on them and were priced at prices that not only left no room for resale but was higher than most dealers would resell the items at.

It did make me thankful that I changed my mind about waiting when I could not get a parking location near by and decided to pass on that particular sale.

It seems though that he has been victim several times to the same situation lately, though it really is his own fault. If an addresses is a retail strip mall location then then it ain’t no estate, lol. If the estate is in an industrial location then again, it ain’t no estate! Sadly when they choose to masquerade an empty home as an estate when they are using it as a retail location then that only hurts the people that operate genuine estate sales.

Dagnamit

What is the name of that ‘law’, oh yeah, Murphy’s Law!

Whatever can go wrong will go wrong!

I have my cargo van loaded, I leave in plenty of time, get half way to Pasadena and I start hearing a slapping noise, it is not too bad and I try my best to ignore it. People that know me well know that I cannot ignore things like this. It was making me go crazy thinking about it.

I spent the whole day, not selling, I lost money! I was despondent about it and quite down in the dumps.

I hit the freeway and as soon as the van reached 65mph, slap slap then bang bang bang bang.

The noise was unbearable. Driving with the radio on full blast and still couldn’t drown out the noise.

The following morning I went into the store and realized that all the printed pricing tags, a box of priced items, was still at home. I hand write tags for everything but because I have left the display case keys at home as well so I cannot put away the 1940’s Buster brown Display Mannequins or the mid century crawling child mannequins.

So I leave them stacked in the front of the van, I open the passenger door and one of the mannequins falls out and lands on his head. A $550 mannequin literally shatters, his head is in a million tiny pieces.

I drive home, get the case keys and tags and return to the store. By now the noise is unbearable and is doing it at 50 mph now. I endure the noise and as soon as I get home and take it to my mechanics. They search for the noise, they can’t find the source and spend hours searching. They even thought about replacing the tires and I approved it. They then took it one time before ordering tires and happened to spot the seal for the windshield had come loose and was flapping in the wind.

So I call the windshield people who repair the problem, thankfully it was under warranty.

I’ve never been so stressed by this before.

I am glad that it didn’t turn out to be something major, I did have visions of the driveshaft falling off or transmission failing. I did make me sick worrying about it.

I do get one less worry, I have no show in January, I am taking a break off to focus on finding some cool stuff and get the business back on track.

If I don’t post before Christmas to anyone that reads it then enjoy your Christmas and New Year.

Well it’s Rosebowl time again…

Yep, less than a week to go and it will be Rosebowl Flea market again, and I am dreading it.

Normally I load on the Monday before and get ready, I got home and I just didn’t feel in the mood to load, too much to do and I guess I am not optimistic about doing well out there. To make it worse, they increased ticket prices by 10% for sellers so that increases the cost of selling from $190 to $210, well it is not literally 10% it is $10 for each ticket and since I have one that was $110 and another that is $80 it is more than 10% for the one ticket and slightly less than that for the other! Either way it is a big price increase. The reason given was that costs have gone up…

…but I believe it is more a case of an increase in the number of sellers that are quitting because it is not financially viable and it is difficult to get out of the flea market at the end of the day because of the ever changing layout that means that it can take 40 minutes to leave the flea market.

The show also has fewer customers coming through the turnstiles, they claim that it is more people but as sellers we have noticed far less people walking around the show ground and they come in later paying the cheapest price possible to enter. Rather than charging less to enter they increase fees to customers and they then arrive late and want everything cheaper and cheaper.

Less staff and now we don’t see trash cans, shoppers dump their trash in our selling spaces and we have to clean that mess up at the end of the day.

Last month I had a customer angry because I wanted his driving license or $30 deposit on a furniture dolly (that he would get back upon return of the dolly). He couldn’t understand that I have lost on average one dolly each month because people buy items and don’t return the dollies in fact I think they keep them to move their purchase when they get home, I can’t carry that loss. The cost of dollies especially the two wheel variety is high, the last two cost me $60 each. The items that were purchased cost that price or less so effectively I gave Away the purchase or lost money on the purchase.

Saying that I would rather sell at the shows than out of the stores, I could sell cheaper at the shows and make more money because of the commission and booth rent costs in the antique mall.

Ideally I would rather sell online and focus on that but who knows how long before eBay makes it no longer viable to sell on there.

I had to chuckle

I had to chuckle, I was waiting outside an estate for it to open and talking to a few others when Ren and Gimpy, a father and daughter buying pair called Bill and Cathy came past, she Drove past and a few looked directly at them, I deliberately do not take notice of them, they are just strange people. They were mouthing abuse at everyone, or actually I think it might have been directed at me because I was not in my home town but a neighboring town. Strange as it seems though this town is closer to mine than to their home town which is about 30 mile drive while I live just over the hill.

I wasn’t really interested, it was cold and I was more interested in waiting for the sale to open, incidentally there was nothing that I wanted to buy there, so i was surprised when the other dealers all said, well there goes the crazies. I asked what they meant and the explanation was very similar to my thoughts about them.

I seems that they were at a sale with Ren and Gimpy and someone picked up something that they wanted and both of them started accusing the poor person of robbing them, in fact the verbal abuse continued with Cathy screaming at the little old lady until she handed the item to her and left in tears.

I had a similar situation though it was caused because I caught her steal out of the antique mall. they are dealers AT&T he same antique mall, While dad was still alive we were rearranging a large display case and i happened to look up and she was stealing from another dealer, putting items into a Christmas bag. I whispered to dad and we watcher her and then when she realized that we were watching her she put back the items and went back to her own booths. I am sure she returned and took the items after we had finished and left.

As to the name. Well I referred to her as Gimpy because for the longest time she had knee issues and was waiting for an operation, she wore denim jeans so tight that she couldn’t bend her legs at all and walked like an upturned catapult or Y shape. The name stuck. She finally did have the operation but went straight back to wearing denims that were way too tight and still walks in that same manner and you can’t miss her gimping along.

Her dad is just as hateful and had made two lady dealers move out of the antique store by screaming at them. One parking where he feels he, and only he, has a right to park. the other didn’t even get a reason, she never knew what she did but I suspect that she caught the daughter stealing, the lady implied as much when we spoke to her just before she moved everything out. She said that she made the mistake of telling the old man that he needs to tell his daughter that she could get into trouble if she keeps doing what she is doing.

As for his name, well there was Ren and Stimpy, now there is Ren and Gimpy. I suppose I could go with those other deals and just call them the crazies.

It did make me laugh inside when I heard that others had the same opinion since they always act like they are wonderful to people and that butter would never melt in their mouths.

I didn’t find any furniture which is what I was looking for, oh well, maybe tomorrow, I need to buy enough to cover the december and start of January period.

I love the hypocrisy of people!

I just can’t help it,  I have to love those people that make claims and then you catch them in the act of doing something they always tell people that they don’t do!

 

I was driving to an address where they claimed that they were holding a sale tomorrow,  I wanted to make sure that I knew where it was because the street is split over three blocks and part of the street is inaccessible from the rest.

So I drive down from the end of the street thinking it was in that first section,  nope, numbers were still in their 600’s.

The next section is tiny,  there is only either one or two houses in this section.  It is actually offset from the longer portion I had just driven down so I turn into that little section and there is Jim,  remember him, the Gossip who will make up what he doesn’t know and fills in blanks and guesses.  Guess I could always call him National Inquirer Jim from now on, lol.  A good name for him since he has made names for everyone else LOL.

Now he always said that he doesn’t earlybird sales.  I had my suspicions from slips he made about where he had gotten things but I had never seen him.

This time I actually catch him in the act.  He was getting back into the car and just stared as I drove past.

As it turns out, it was a location that holds sales regularly and I have never bought anything from them.   They are as expensive as buying from a thrift store.

So I had to laugh.  Explains why he is never out early.

So, I never actually bought anything today and two of the sales tomorrow are ones that have sales all the time so it makes tomorrow quicker and easier to deal with.  Guess it will be visiting thrift shops to bulk up the furniture for sale.