Shipwreck Day 2013
Felt stressed over #Anacortes #Shipwreck Days this year. Highlight of our summer selling season, a huge flea market, main street of Anacortes filled with pop-ups and tables and piles of random stuff and junk three abreast for ten blocks.
Draws mobs of folks into the show for a good time, and we do our best to meet their expectations. Our side of the things hinge on the Monday morning nine am visit to the bank drive through. Fun to be sure, but just another day in the office. Not. The most important single selling day of the year.
Mary Jane puts a significant amount of preparation work into selecting the Shipwreck inventory. I planned a somewhat different layout for our booth space over the solstice weekend, when we did a garage sale at home. In the past I had maximized display area for our junk, but the layout of the booth space tended to restrict the movement of people through the area. This year I gambled on less display area in favor of a more open space where people could move in and out both sides.
Of course I worried. Worried that Mary Jane would make me load way more stuff than could possibly fit into the space. She did. I thought we had at least twice, if not three times more junk than could be piled on those tables and shelves. We got it all out in quick time. Worried that we were dragging out boxes of old shit that no one had ever wanted to buy all the ten thousand times it had been set out in the past. Why would anyone fork over their hard earned money for today. Surely the final count of the days winnings would wipe the grin off our faces. Wrong again.
In the end, that is what is so much fun about Shipwreck. People come into the street with different eyes than our usual customers. And a good many of them start the day with pockets filled with bills, credit cards in reserve, and by golly they are not going home until they have spent it all. Dealers and hucksters and honest sellers do well of course, but from the cool junk I see come along the street in front of our space, the shoppers came out ahead of the game every time.
Draws mobs of folks into the show for a good time, and we do our best to meet their expectations. Our side of the things hinge on the Monday morning nine am visit to the bank drive through. Fun to be sure, but just another day in the office. Not. The most important single selling day of the year.
Mary Jane puts a significant amount of preparation work into selecting the Shipwreck inventory. I planned a somewhat different layout for our booth space over the solstice weekend, when we did a garage sale at home. In the past I had maximized display area for our junk, but the layout of the booth space tended to restrict the movement of people through the area. This year I gambled on less display area in favor of a more open space where people could move in and out both sides.
Of course I worried. Worried that Mary Jane would make me load way more stuff than could possibly fit into the space. She did. I thought we had at least twice, if not three times more junk than could be piled on those tables and shelves. We got it all out in quick time. Worried that we were dragging out boxes of old shit that no one had ever wanted to buy all the ten thousand times it had been set out in the past. Why would anyone fork over their hard earned money for today. Surely the final count of the days winnings would wipe the grin off our faces. Wrong again.
In the end, that is what is so much fun about Shipwreck. People come into the street with different eyes than our usual customers. And a good many of them start the day with pockets filled with bills, credit cards in reserve, and by golly they are not going home until they have spent it all. Dealers and hucksters and honest sellers do well of course, but from the cool junk I see come along the street in front of our space, the shoppers came out ahead of the game every time.
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