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random ramblings of lug just walking home on a sunny december day when he didn’t want to do his job. it is just fine, lmao. not really tech related, but i don’t care.

A couple of days ago, I decided to get off of work early (i wasn’t in the mood of like, doing my job that one day), so I asked my manager if I can get off working for the day, and like, I was still surprised it fucking worked. I suppose it worked because it was like, December 23rd, and there was barely work to be done, so…

So there I go, getting off of work 6 hours earlier than I supposed to, and while that happened, I decided to take the longer walk home. As I walked home, I saw a lot of interesting stuff, I saw a couple new buildings that have started to show up recently, and I saw the immense traffic go by me, only a couple meters away from the sidewalk. After a couple of minutes, maybe 30 or so, I was tired. I had the wrong shoes for walking, which did not help in the slightest.

I got to where a bus stop was, which was near where the flea market that I used to go as a kid was. It was in a sorta plaza, in that plaza was a Little Caesar’s, a pawn shop where you can get some pretty good electronics deals if you were lucky enough (my sister managed to get a cheap ass Samsung S21 there, lmao), as well as some random businesses that would open, last a couple years, and then die out years later. The flea market itself was a more larger thing, there was an entrance in the plaza area, and it lead to a series of gravel foot paths that were something like 3 or 4 meters wide. Along the footpaths were stall booths, small rooms of maybe 2x2 meters or maybe sometimes longer, or wider, stalls where sellers would sell their merchandise from. Deeper into the flea market, I remember that there were more sellers that sold electronics, I remember fondly there was this one stall in the middle of this small plaza area where a guy had a large, old school plasma TV, maybe for sale, and a disco ball on a pole somewhere, and the TV would play random pirated discs all the time, and the stall itself was just dedicated to selling DVD players, CD players, smaller TVs, and maybe pirated media too. In front of said stall, was my favorite stall there: the guy who owned the stall sold a bunch of older mid-thousands electronics that no one wanted, and I of course managed to get my mom to buy me a couple of things from there, and it was great. All of these cooler stalls are now closed, and are now all but gone. In fact, most of the flea market’s land was sold off, to be gentrified into more established shops, which would probably never offer the same cheap prices as the flea market had at one point. As I finished taking a look at the flea market, and I gone my way towards the bus stop, I thought about all those times I went there, and now it is pretty much gone, which is sad really.

I remember that me and my family were always the sort of people that would never pass up on a good deal. Back when yard sales used to be this huge thing., I remember every Saturday, we would just go on and scour yard sales, we would just go out on the weekends and take a look on what we can find. Usually we start early on a Saturday, we go to thrift stores first, and if that fails, our next stop would be the various yard sales people would put out on the weekends, and sometimes it was the opposite way around, first yard sales, then thrift stores. One thing we often bought was VHS tapes, since in this era (late 2000s) no one wanted them and they were just being sold for the boxful, for pennies on the dollar. I sometimes begged my parents for things that I remember were cool, like a phone, that had no signal (yet had a camera on it, that can record glorious uhh, 144p video?, or like a vacuum thing that had no cord to it? There was also a fire extinguisher that was probably used, that I asked my parents to buy for me and I would try again and again to nail that thing onto the fucking wall (it had its own bracket and everything, lmao). And like, there was that time we found an iPod Shuffle for very cheap, because the owner lost the cord to it. I remember during this time, it was just so easy to find old computers that no one wanted. Old beige shitboxes, some more decent Windows XP era computers, and in certain, more richer neighborhoods, you had the chance to find a Power Mac G3 or G4 in a yard sale, which are computers I would’ve loved to have as a kid. And if it wasn’t Power Macs, it was the more affordable iMacs that would show up. I have this kinda nostalgia for this era, and like, I don’t know how to describe it. But anyways, at the end of our bargain hunting, we would end up going to McDonald’s, because of course me and my sisters were just children back then, and McDonald’s back then was still somewhat affordable, so yeah, lmao.

Eventually I would move to somewhere else, and the city that we moved to has multiple huge flea markets that you can visit over the weekend. You could find probably everything. Pirated movies and music (which the cops of course knew about but they didn’t gave a shit, lmao), modded game consoles, clothes, more clothes, dodgy PC parts, used TVs, used electronics, used smartphones, cheap produce that is probably cheaper than anything you can get at any supermarket, cartons upon cartons of eggs, if you can sell it to someone dumb enough to buy it, most likely you’d be able to find it there. And it was great. I remember my trips to the flea markets, how you can find clothes for absurdly cheap, mid-thousands electronics also sold there as well. If you wanted even better deals, you had to either have good skills with price haggling or deal hunting. I remember I haggled a price down from 250 to 170 (insert local currency name here) for a pair of Bluetooth headphones, and well, that was fun. Like the man didn’t know what he had, he thought it was some sort of like ear protection for gun range shooting, and I was like “oh, those aren’t ear muffs, those are headphones” and I shot my price, and the guy accepted, lmao.

As time went on, stuff like Facebook Marketplace, the arrival of discount stores1, online retailers like Shien and Temu, all gave a death blow to this local flea market (and others like it) that I used to go so often. The pandemic made things worse, since it forced stalls to close their doors. Once the pandemic ended, large parts of this flea market were closed off, and it seems that it would end up dying. Now, it really is just a shadow of its former self. Many of the stalls that I remember seeing, are either closed, or moved off to other nearby flea markets. And those other flea markets are now invaded by scalpers, shitty people that roam to stall to stall, trying to find a good deal to snatch up, and then resell it on Facebook Marketplace at twice the markup.

These flea markets still exist, of course. But they are no longer what they used to. They’re like ghosts, still around, but no where near the glory days. In the same way thrift stores are no longer places you can get awesome bargains, flea stores here are pretty much the same. Electronics are now comically expensive. Clothes are more pricey, sold like fucking new, and you don’t know if the clothes they’re selling are awful Temu rejects. At least the produce and food you can get there is still probably good, I think.

I don’t really know how to end this post. I like, got onto the bus that one day after walking around that flea market, and had the idea for a post, and the title, “death of a flea market”, just kinda came to mind. So uhh, you end up with this post you’re reading now. So yeah.

updates

  1. essentially stores that sell imported stuff from China, often at very low prices. These stores have pretty much taken over downtown, in this city that I live in.↩︎