Shake your booty

For reasons I won't bore you with, we're doing a fair bit of sorting out at the moment. It means we've uncovered a lot of boxes marked "eBay" - more out of a desperate hope that they might somehow list themselves and walk out of the door, than with any expectation that we'll ever actively engage in their sale - as well as making life-changing decisions to finally throw out that box of bubble wrap and the futon base that's a bit split.

Having (almost) confronted the eBay demon, we started considering other options for tat disposal, the most obvious and convenient being a car boot sale. There's one held every weekend at Bowlers, so we decided to pop along there today for a bit of a nose, suss out the competition and get some idea what second-hand books, CDs and DVDs sell for these days.

This short visit was a revelation on many levels, the first being that in the approximately thirty years between my last car boot sale (as a vendor) and this (as a browser) Nothing. Has. Changed. Except perhaps that, here at least, some indoor pitches have power, and vendors plug their tat in to prove it still works. Oh, and it's £15 for a pitch now, when it used to be a fiver. But broken down pasting tables? Check! Dog-eared paperbacks? Check! Unrecognisable bits of kitchen paraphernalia? Check! Old clocks, mirrors, grandma's teeth mug, scuffed toys, jigsaw puzzles in broken boxes? Yes, they're all still there. Might be exactly the same stuff as I used to pick through thirty years ago as far as I can tell, apart from the DVDs of course. We didn't have DVDs in 1980.

Most DVDs look to be selling for a pound or two. Some vendors had attempted to arbitrarily apply a range of pricing based on some vague perception of rarity, popularity or whatever, in 50p increments starting at £1. Others just applied a tatty notice stating "all DVDs £2" to a boxful. But whatever pricing was in operation, we never saw anyone browsing the movies. We later discovered this particular venue has a bit of a reputation for carrying snide merchandise, which was a bit disappointing as we've a couple of dozen to shift. It wasn't just films - no-one seemed to be in a buying mood. Punters in general were a bit thin on the ground; surprising for such a sunny Sunday. Maybe having such a large sale every week in the same place suffers from the law of diminishing returns. Certainly, on the face of it, we'd be hard pushed to make back our pitch price, which kind of defeats the object. Anyone want to buy a model Ferrari?