Sometimes it’s better to check out what other vendors are selling before you set up.
If you find some strong competition, you can tell them that you have some
merchandise that you would like to unload. Make them an offer to sell out. If the dealer has any spare cash and can buy you out for below their cost, many will jump at the chance.
The trick here is to mark up the wholesale price enough to make a quick profit.
Unload the merchandise and move on. Another choice; stay and put out a different product line. You do have a back-up product line, don’t you?
One time, I bought a lifetime supply of fillet-meat knives. The whole deal cost me $30.00. It seems that in the big meat slaughtering houses that after a knife gets worn down too much, they chuck them in a 55 gallon barrel and get a new one out.
Somewhere down the line the barrel full of knives gets wholesaled off at some incredibly cheap price.
It was a slow, cold day at the market. A vendor friend gave me a tip. He knew that I sometimes sold knives and right behind me on the next aisle was a guy with a lot of knives. He was broke and needed gas money to get out of town.
I went over to his booth and introduced myself. I asked about the knives. He said,
“if you’ll take all of them, you can have all three banana boxes for ten dollars a box”. The deal was made. He picked up the boxes for me and carried them back to my booth. How convenient!
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How many knives you ask? Somewhere around 700! I routinely put one or two
out at a time for $3 dollars each. I never leave home without them.
Call it road insurance. I know that I can always:
sell them to another vendor for $50-75/ hundred or
trade them or keep selling a few each day for 3 bucks each (fishermen love
them).
Here again is an example of freedom on the road.
Another example of dealer-to-dealer sales: Quartzsite, Arizona - a legend in its own time. Quartzsite used to be a flea-market vendor’s gone-to-heaven kind of place. So good that you don’t want to even share the info with a newbie.
In the short four winter months it’s claimed that more than 1 million people stop to shop the five or so flea markets. The markets are strung out along the service roads next to I-10. The traffic builds all winter and peaks with the “Rock and Mineral” Show that is held in February each year.
Ever since I heard about Quartzsite, it was on my to-do list. Luck was on my side.
About 10 years ago I bought a little Chinook motor home ( I still have it ). It was a local sale from an old guy. He re-did everything in the rig. It was in great condition; a perfect rig for one or two people.
I got him down on the price to $3,000. We agreed and I went right to my bank, got the cash out of my savings and paid him off. We were both happy. What a deal!
Copyright © 2004 Larry L. Austin
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I got a completely rebuilt motor home for 3 grand. Everything worked; rebuilt motor, 3-way fridge, stove, heater , 4-speed transmission., bathroom and a closet.
It was a traveling low-profiler’s dream, 27 to 29 miles/gallon on regular gas.
Wow!
Note: If you want to travel as cheap as possible, start looking for one of these.
They are getting old now and it might take two of them; one to use for parts to get and keep the other one in A-1 condition. The years to look for are 1976 and 1977.
They are built on a Toyota pick-up chassis. The 20R, 4-cylinder gas engine is the one to look for. I have heard that it is not too safe to get one with dual rear wheels; it seems that some of those had trouble with the rear axle breaking off. If this is correct, I would stay away from a rear dual axle. The thought of an axle breaking off high in the Colorado Rockies is not my kind of adventure!
Back to Quartzsite. At the time, I was selling and making jewelry. I packed
everything I could in the Chinook and headed for Arizona. It is a long drive from Florida. About a week later, I pulled into Quartzsite. The first thing I did was to look up an old friend of mine.
She was known on the road as “Kay the bead lady.” We had a nice chat over
dinner. Kay had been set-up from about the first of November and was doing well.
Over dinner, she started telling me of all the changes that had been made to the markets by the owners and the powers-that-be.
Quartzsite had changed. The town had gone “permit crazy”. Everywhere you
went, it cost plenty just to set up. There was a lot of competition. Too much competition. Forget it!
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At the time, there was a free, primitive campground right behind one of the
markets. I stayed around for a few days and bought wholesale jewelry from some of the other dealers. This made all of us happy. I got nice rings with gemstones for 1 or 2 dollars each. The dealers made money and I knew I could mark the rings up at least 5 x.
The next day, I ran into a dealer friend from the El Paso, Texas area. He had just arrived and was setting up his booth. He had a small open trailer behind his van that was loaded with bleached-out goat and sheep skulls (these are hot sellers in the Western markets). The trailer had about 425 skulls in it. He put a tarpaulin over it to protect the skulls from the sun and prying eyes - no need to worry about rain out here!
He rented a small 10-foot space and set up his tables under his canopy. Of course, he only put a few skulls out at a time. The others were carefully covered and out of sight.
Word must have spread fast among the other dealers. They started buying from him wholesale. The minimum you could buy to get the wholesale price was 3
skulls. If you only wanted one or two, you had to pay retail for them. If I remember correctly, his wholesale price to other dealers was around 35-55 dollars each. This depended on how nice they were.
Four days later, I decided to check back with my friend. It was early and I was thinking about inviting him out for breakfast. When I walked up to his booth, strangely enough, he had only 2 skulls on his table. He was sitting inside his van reading a gun catalog. As I had said earlier, he was from the El Paso area, so I always called him “El Paso” I approached the side of the van and said “El Paso, Copyright © 2004 Larry L. Austin
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you can’t make any money if you don’t set some stuff out” El Paso calmly took off his reading glasses, closed the gun catalog and turned to me with a big smile.
“I’ve sold out.”
“Wow!”, I thought (4 days, $35-55 dollars x 425 skulls= ??) go figure. So, off to breakfast we went. He even paid for mine! How thoughtful!
This kind of dealer-to-dealer sales go on all over the country. Who knows, dealer-to-dealer sales could be your cup of tea.
Another time, I had a big load of fashion jewelry; the kind that you would see at K-Mart or Wal-Mart. I had just opened the box. There was a lot of the same stuff in the load. Altogether, there was something like 100 dozen items. It was a Big box.
The guy across the aisle from me said that he had a small store in another town.
He kept it open on weekdays and then sold at a flea market on the weekend. He said that he had some jewelry in the store and was looking for more. So I went over to his booth, pulled up a chair next to him.
We were both staring out at the people walking by. I said that I had a lot of duplicates and I could wholesale some to him - that is, for his store but not to sell against me here at the market.
He shook his head and told me the he was not interested. We both kept staring at the people walking by. Then I said, “The necklaces are pre-priced at 3-5 dollars each, I can let you have 50 of them, your choice for $10 dollars. That would make your wholesale cost only 20 cents each.” The guy never looked sideways at me, never smiled, reached in his pocket, and handed me a $10 dollar bill. “I’ll be over in a couple of minutes to pick them out.”
Copyright © 2004 Larry L. Austin
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A lesson well-learned: You never know until you make an offer. What was in it for me? My cost was 10 cents each, so I doubled my money. I got rid of
unnecessary inventory and recovered 10% of my cost for the whole 100 dozen.
All in about 5 minutes!
If you buy right, you can make money selling to other vendors. The down side…
if you go full-time at it , you will need lots and lots of inventory and probably a cargo trailer to haul it in.
Copyright © 2004 Larry L. Austin
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