Yard Sales-Breathing New Life Into Old Stuff

You can find people selling their old stuff for cheap everywhere…and Bucharest has recently adopted the custom.

România Internațional, 30.06.2013, 11:59

The name runs on the same lines in most places, Marché des pouces in France, Fleemarkt in Germany, to quote just a couple. These flea markets may sometime bring unexpected fortunes to reluctant owners. Bucharest has recently adopted the custom.

We talked to Andreea Urda, one of the promoters of such events: “This is a flea market type of business, but because Romanians have so many words that have lost their meaning and gained a pejorative dimension, we called it not a flea market, but a yard sale. The first event was in February this year, and it all started with me changing homes, and I discovered that I have a lot of clothes and things that I could not bring myself to throw away, and I thought I would give them away, or barter them away, or sell them at a discount, and I thought I better have a yard sale, not just for myself, but for other people in the same situation, and here we are, at the fifth edition.”

These sellers of bargains register for every edition, because they started liking a lot the sales, and new members come in all the time. They are brought in by friends, or find out about it through social media, or from Gabriela’s website. How do things go?

Gabriela Urda:“They register, they pay a minimal fee that covers costs and the rent for the space we use. We gather in a café, the same most times, which we had to switch for a larger one, more central. We gather Sunday from morning to evening, and we wait for people, who usually show up in large numbers, they rummage through our things and get stuff for cheap, from 5 to 50 lei. I think we have a few hundred people every edition.”

Gabriela Urda told us what she believes the attraction is: “Many come to rummage and discover things, rather than go to a shop and get something everyone else has. We have a kind of life that is fairly standardized and limited, people need surprises. They enjoy more for a five lei bargain than they would something more expensive. It is a joy to get a bargain. Then many of the would be buyers bring their own stuff they want to give away. We have to put them back out there, because in our consumer society we gather a lot of stuff which ends up in the trash. It is not trash, it should be reused, recycled. This is how we get to recycle on a small scale, put back on the market clothes the kids outgrew and end up forgotten in a wardrobe. We use our resources better. We also had a vintage salon not long ago. Vintage begins as early as 1920 and ends in 1980. Sometimes the stuff we bring are beautiful and has great sentimental value, like granny’s dresses. Some are just objects created a long time ago, knickknacks, jewelry, which are cheap, but have been made a very long time ago. If you bought a blouse and wore it for a year, what do you do with it? It stays in the wardrobe, gathers dust and that’s it. If you bring it to the yard sale, at worst you exchange it for something else. If not, you sell it, and you end up enjoying it anyway.”

We asked Gabriela Urda what her greatest surprise was at these Sunday gatherings: “The people who came were the greatest surprise. They are very open minded. I saw a lot of acquaintances that I hadn’t seen in a while, people from fashion, stylists, journalists, and other people. The information spread by itself, by various means. Socializing on a Sunday also attracts people, they hand around more than they would in a store, and they seem happier. It is a social event, I would have wanted it to also be an event for young people who are into fashion and want something different. I want to do this every month, a flea market that is an opportunity to learn that things have more than one life.”

In fact, according to Gabriela Urda, that is one of our shortcomings. We are impulse buyers who just leave things in wardrobes. When we discover that they take up too much of our space, yard sales are a solution.