Going on sale

My 6-year old son has so many toys and I’m afraid that I don’t have anybody else to blame for the situation than myself. Sometimes, I think that he just likes the process of buying things and the fun of choosing a new toy rather than the toy itself. We have thought about selling his ‘not so cool toys’ at a Car Boot Sale, but, until last Sunday, it was just a thought. Every time we asked him to choose the toys to sell, he chose only a few bought  from Poundland; and you cannot make business with just a few very uncool toys.

Car Boot Sale is basically a fair, in our case organised by the school, where people come to sell their unwanted things. There is a small fee that you need to pay to the school to participate. It is lots of fun to go as a customer and even more fun as a seller, as we found out last Sunday.

I don’t know where it came from, but suddenly my son was very eager to sell his old toys. As we don’t have a car, we put all the toys in a big suitcase and went to the sale. We are not early risers, so when we arrived, the best spaces at the sale where already gone, so we had to set up our ‘table’ at the end of the square. At first, it seemed that nobody was interested in a suitcase full of boys’ toys (read: lizards, snakes, spiders, dinosaurs etc). My son got really bored and even a bit frustrated, but then our luck turned. A family with 4 boys arrived and they just loved the things that were on sale. They even came back for the second time to buy more things. It was like a trigger: more and more customers found the way to our suitcase. The prices at the Car Boot Sale are small, so my son didn’t make a huge fortune, but the £8.25 that he earned on that morning, made him really happy. His very first salary! He acted like a real businessman, explaining how some toys worked and being patient when a customer couldn’t decide what to choose and it seemed that he really liked the whole process. I was afraid that if he saw that somebody really liked the toys, he might regret selling them. But it didn’t happen, everything went really well! He couldn’t sell out all the toys, so we might do it another time again or as my son said – we will definitely do it again!  

by Eva Unt

If you can read  Estonian, cheak Eva's blog at  www.evajacolondonis.blogspot.com

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