Car Boot Sales

Warning: Contains adult language

Somebody suggested I might like to go to a car boot sale. No, I wouldn’t! As a bloke, to put it mildly, car boot sales have never been high on my agenda. As far as I’m concerned a car boot sale is a scam where people try to offload their unwanted junk to the public and make the suckers pay to take it away! Okay, so maybe once in a while somebody finds a rare ancient Egyptian artefact, rescued from a Pharaoh’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings, that’s somehow made its way down the ages to the rickety trestle table that some scammer has set up in a farmer’s field, and they are oblivious to the fact that the item is worth a small fortune so you pick it up for one pound fifty. But mostly a car boot sale is a jumble sale for the middle classes! (I should note here that I have nothing against the middle classes, if indeed they actually exist these days. I use the term only to depict a section of the great British public. Interestingly, isn't it strange that there is a mentality out there that rails against the so called ‘class’ system but sings the praises of the ‘working class’ loud and clear?)

Anyway, car boot sales! Not my ‘cup of Early Grey’ but I have to confess I have been to one - as a seller. No, I am not being hypocritical. I wasn’t selling junk. It was suggested to me as a good way to part with unwanted ‘stuff’ when I was ‘downsizing’ from a house to an apartment. No matter how attached you are to your belongings, sometimes they ain’t going to fit a new property. So they had to go. But, what a nightmare experience!

First of all, I was told I had to be at the location at 5:30 in the morning to set up, hours before the public was allowed access. No idea why, but I complied. I pulled in, unloaded my trestle table and then opened the car boot. Out of nowhere, it seemed, a throng of people descended on the car (fellow sellers, it transpired) like vultures. They crowded around, pushing forward as I started to unload my things. Some even had the cheek to pick up items from the boot and examine them. I tried to back them off by manoeuvring from one side of the rear of the car to the other. I felt like a lion trying to keep a pack of slavering hyenas away from the carcass of my kill. I couldn’t understand it. I knew I didn’t have a boot full of crap trinkets but I wasn’t packing Tutankhamen’s Saturday night 'going out' jewellery either. As I tried to keep one side at bay, someone would creep up on my blind side, pick something out of the boot, examine it and ask how much.

“Mate, I ain’t selling. That’s my wheel brace, ya dick!”

So, you’ll be thinking the idea is to get rid of ‘stuff’ and make money. Don’t matter who’s buying. Maybe, but when I’m doing anything I like to do it properly in an organised fashion so I keep control of what it was I set out to do. I just wanted to get my table set up, arrange the things I was selling in an orderly fashion, know where everything is and then do the selling when I was ready. I didn’t want the hyenas snaffling bits off the carcass in a chaotic frenzy.

Anyway, I managed to back them all off by shutting the boot, standing with my arms folded and leaning against the car with a defiant ‘sod off’ expression fixed on my face. Eventually they decided there were easier pickings elsewhere and left me alone to get my table set up and my wares displayed just how I wanted.

Then the public showed up!

I swear to God ninety percent of the people who think a fun morning out us sniffing around other people’s tat are professional scavengers. It was an eye opener. There’s me thinking that this would be a civilised, professional sales process but I soon discovered that I was being a naive dickhead. They mill around your table, pick stuff up and examine it like they are all experts from Sotheby's. Then put it down again with a disdainful look, as if they were doing me a favour by even approaching my table.

A woman picked up a whiskey decanter that came with four whiskey tumblers.

“How much?” she asked.

“Uh, five quid the lot,” I replied.

“Will you take twenty p for the decanter?” she replied.

I’m thinking, ‘Twenty p! No! I won’t. Where can you buy anything at all for twenty frigging pence? Are you off your trolley? You can’t even buy a bar of chocolate for that.’ But, hoping to make my first sale, I said, “It’s Dartington Crystal.” It was! An unused and now unwanted wedding gift since the wife had buggered off with some gym freak she met, ironically, at a church charity jumble sale. “It’s part of the set. I’ve even got the original boxes.” I reached under the table to search for the boxes which were in a bin liner. I halted when she increased her bid.

“Twenty-five p,” she said.

My mind was racing. Who, on the planet, increases their negotiating position in five pence increments? What was wrong with this woman? “Uh, look, I’ll take four quid for the lot, tumblers and all, okay? It’s quality stuff. I’m not selling no… you know… uh, crap.”

“I don’t want the tumblers,” the woman said. “Thirty p, take it or leave it.”

Take it or leave it? Who’s doing the selling here? I took a deep breath and tried to apply some logic even though I knew I was getting tetchy. 

“Look, just a point worth thinking about. If you buy a whiskey decanter presumably you’re going to put whiskey in it, and then the whiskey needs to be poured into tumblers…” I tried a touch of lightness, adding with a smile, “...unless you’re going to give your guests a straw each and ask them to suck up your fifteen year old malt fishbowl-style like a bunch of teenagers on an Ayia Napa stag do. So, as a deal…" I did a quick calculation based on my customer's own grasp of economics… fifty pence per glass, so two quid subtracted from my original generous pricing… “Call it three quid, decanter and glasses. Bargain for a genuine Dartington Crystal set.”

Her expression didn’t change. “Thirty pence, my final offer.”

I smiled, a kind of rueful, ‘What the fuck, you for real,’ smile. Our valuations were significantly at odds.

“You know what?” I said, “I’m with you. I like the word ‘final.’ This is my final refusal.” She scowled and walked off.

And it went on like that. The wheeler-dealers operating in pence! I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t sink to that level of small mindedness. My ‘stuff’ was good quality. I don’t buy junk! I’m a Capricorn, after all. By the end of the morning, after hardcore negotiation, I’d sold five items and made five pounds and seventy-five-pence! I took home most of the stuff I’d turned up with. Maybe I was being bloodyminded - I guess the point of the sale was to get rid of things you no longer need, but I just couldn’t cope with the petty penny pinching.

Anybody want to buy six Dom Perignon Baccarat flutes? Offers over twenty five pence!