Bizarre Bazaars
Selling
A month or so ago I was feeling some of the familiar signs that a posting was imminent. Feeling more reflective than usual, wanting to write something, not wanting to do the dishes. Also, the impulse for an entry is often brought on by some new activity or situation here in Germany.
Well, after two years, I had finally begun to dabble in the occupation of immigrants the world over, since the beginning of time: Sales!
I sold a small bag of baby clothes at a snooty second-hand shop (with the Űbertrendy girl’s name “Lilu”--pronounced /LEE/ LOO/, heavy stress on both syllables--try saying that 3, 456, 326 times. But, I digress).
I also opened up an account on the buy-and-cell internet site “Der Heisse Draht 24” ('the Hot Wire', like Ebay but without the bidding) to rid ourselves of a sofa-bed that took up too much room and a transitional crib that we had Marco biding his time in until Leo was ready to give his up.
With this selling kick, I had some experiences that felt relatively blog-worthy. For the baby clothes, it was negative. I was offered only 20 euro and no explanation of individual pricing. The store owner pointed to my bag on the floor and said something along the lines of “take it or leave it”. Though I felt my cute little babythings deserved more, I had lugged the bundle a couple miles on my bike a few days earlier and didn’t feel like carrying it back with me (Leo and Marco were also in the bike trailer, so there was no room). So I accepted her wrinkled bill, feeling defeated and a little cheated. I then heard myself actually thanking the woman, the way we Americans do after any such exchange. She looked up at me and held my gaze but said nothing, not even goodbye, her absolute power over me unobscured by conventional expressions of kindness.
If Leo or Marco EVER bring a Lilu home from the playground….
Happily, the internet sales were positive. The goal was to move my merchandise quickly and not to make millions, so I priced both items at half the value of anything comparable from the same category. A good strategy. Germans love bargains but the poor dears rarely have access to them (the “5% jubilee sale” is quite common in retail stores), so they were calling us all day long. And both “pick-up” exchanges were pleasant in the extreme. My customers showed up when they said they would, paid without attempting to bargain, and actually thanked me. One was a balding, skinny dad with glasses helping his skinny daughter decorate her first apartment, the other a proud new grandpa furnishing a grandchild’s room. The experience also made me feel capable and semi-integrated into society, since I wrote the ads and took all the phone calls in German. But not quite enough for an entire blog.
But buying in Germany is another story. We have been participating in the second-hand marketplace, on the buying end, ever since we bought those bikes at the police auction (see entry from 2006). A lot can be learned about a culture from their used goods. Read on.
A month or so ago I was feeling some of the familiar signs that a posting was imminent. Feeling more reflective than usual, wanting to write something, not wanting to do the dishes. Also, the impulse for an entry is often brought on by some new activity or situation here in Germany.
Well, after two years, I had finally begun to dabble in the occupation of immigrants the world over, since the beginning of time: Sales!
I sold a small bag of baby clothes at a snooty second-hand shop (with the Űbertrendy girl’s name “Lilu”--pronounced /LEE/ LOO/, heavy stress on both syllables--try saying that 3, 456, 326 times. But, I digress).
I also opened up an account on the buy-and-cell internet site “Der Heisse Draht 24” ('the Hot Wire', like Ebay but without the bidding) to rid ourselves of a sofa-bed that took up too much room and a transitional crib that we had Marco biding his time in until Leo was ready to give his up.
With this selling kick, I had some experiences that felt relatively blog-worthy. For the baby clothes, it was negative. I was offered only 20 euro and no explanation of individual pricing. The store owner pointed to my bag on the floor and said something along the lines of “take it or leave it”. Though I felt my cute little babythings deserved more, I had lugged the bundle a couple miles on my bike a few days earlier and didn’t feel like carrying it back with me (Leo and Marco were also in the bike trailer, so there was no room). So I accepted her wrinkled bill, feeling defeated and a little cheated. I then heard myself actually thanking the woman, the way we Americans do after any such exchange. She looked up at me and held my gaze but said nothing, not even goodbye, her absolute power over me unobscured by conventional expressions of kindness.
If Leo or Marco EVER bring a Lilu home from the playground….
Happily, the internet sales were positive. The goal was to move my merchandise quickly and not to make millions, so I priced both items at half the value of anything comparable from the same category. A good strategy. Germans love bargains but the poor dears rarely have access to them (the “5% jubilee sale” is quite common in retail stores), so they were calling us all day long. And both “pick-up” exchanges were pleasant in the extreme. My customers showed up when they said they would, paid without attempting to bargain, and actually thanked me. One was a balding, skinny dad with glasses helping his skinny daughter decorate her first apartment, the other a proud new grandpa furnishing a grandchild’s room. The experience also made me feel capable and semi-integrated into society, since I wrote the ads and took all the phone calls in German. But not quite enough for an entire blog.
But buying in Germany is another story. We have been participating in the second-hand marketplace, on the buying end, ever since we bought those bikes at the police auction (see entry from 2006). A lot can be learned about a culture from their used goods. Read on.
Buying
Flohmarkt : Supposedly, Hannover’s Saturday morning flea market is one of the oldest and best in all of Germany. While the merchants’ tables, lining an ancient bridge, and the early fog from the Leine River in the historic “old city” are lovely, I hate to think this is the best market around. You’re supposed to arrive early to get the good stuff, but I think they just say that to make you think they had good stuff but they sold it before you woke up. We have never made it there before 9:00 or so, and by then, what remains are piles of antiquey trinkets, cobwebby paintings, old kitchen appliances that are not yet “retro”, knives, musty books in German, and a small selection of overpriced and under-restored wood furniture. On our first, touristy visit, when my Dad and Nan were visiting back in 2006, we bought a big antique armoire and even bargained it down a bit. Good thing, because fleamarkets in Germany are not cheap. Go figure. We visited a few more times but eventually stopped because it was making us homesick. Oh, how we longed for the Saturday morning garage sales in the USA, infinitely superior in all ways, except for that very few of them can boast medieval European settings.
Flohmarkt : Supposedly, Hannover’s Saturday morning flea market is one of the oldest and best in all of Germany. While the merchants’ tables, lining an ancient bridge, and the early fog from the Leine River in the historic “old city” are lovely, I hate to think this is the best market around. You’re supposed to arrive early to get the good stuff, but I think they just say that to make you think they had good stuff but they sold it before you woke up. We have never made it there before 9:00 or so, and by then, what remains are piles of antiquey trinkets, cobwebby paintings, old kitchen appliances that are not yet “retro”, knives, musty books in German, and a small selection of overpriced and under-restored wood furniture. On our first, touristy visit, when my Dad and Nan were visiting back in 2006, we bought a big antique armoire and even bargained it down a bit. Good thing, because fleamarkets in Germany are not cheap. Go figure. We visited a few more times but eventually stopped because it was making us homesick. Oh, how we longed for the Saturday morning garage sales in the USA, infinitely superior in all ways, except for that very few of them can boast medieval European settings.
Used Kinderwagen (see photo). A lemon. A 150€ embarrassment. Marco is comfortable in it, but the tires (which are different sizes, something I didn’t notice when I bought it from a seemingly nice Kazakhstanian family) always go flat, are annoying to inflate, and the handle bar always snaps when steering. I should have probably been suspicious after noticing that the youngest girl in said family was 15. Some things really should be bought new, I guess. But, as I like to show visitors whom I drag to the German version of Babys R Us, a new stroller like this can cost 750€.
Kinderbazaars: These second-hand sales for kids’ clothes, toys and accessories—advertised on flyers and most common in spring and fall—have been on my radar since moving here. When we first arrived, it was September, and memories of the second-hand extravanganzas at the southern baptist churches were still fresh. Those Georgia church rec rooms would fill to bursting, with toys still in their boxes, strollers, kids’ furniture, books in shrinkwrap, clothes still with tags, all at rock-bottom prices. So it was a shock to show up at my first German Kinderbazaar at a YMCA-type place and see the sparse sale tables laid with neatly folded, faded clothes, old toys in crates, board games, and stacks of puzzles, all manned by dour salespeople. There was less selection, less room to move about, and the merchandise was more worn. The most tempting part was the Coffee and Cake buffet. But prices were good and, in addition to cake, I bought plenty of clothes, partly in an effort to dress Leo more like a German child. Some hits were a pair of navy sweats for 50 cents that he still wears to gymnastics class, and a preppy, English style hunting parka that we gleefully discovered had an old chestnut in one pocket and some other toddler’s pacifier in the other. But I stopped going to them for a long time, until recently, when I learned the unspoken rule of these Kinderbazaars: the richer the neighborhood, the better the Bazaar.
Mosh pit at St. Elizabeth’s: Not only is St. Elizabeth’s a catholic Kindergarten—meaning that most of the kids who go there have parents who choose to pay the optional 10% tithe—it’s in one of the best parts of the city, umm, just a few blocks from our house. You did know we live next door to the ex-Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder, didn’t you? Yeah, well, his kid, from his 4th marriage, goes to this Kindergarten. You get the picture. All the moms had been talking about the St. Elizabeth sale for weeks. The cake alone was legend. It was to start at 2:00 on a Sunday and both boys needed winter coats so I was going to give it a shot. When Leo and I arrived at 1:50, the line was snaking around an entire block, a heterogeneous mix of tall blondes with 7even Jeans and brown leather riding boots (the locals), loud Russian ladies with bright lipstick, and subdued Muslim families. Most of the parents with children had them strapped to their bodies, and I soon learned why. The cramped sale space, spread over two floors, was so crowded and chaotic with the bargain-hungry, so few of whom favored deodorant, that Leo and I lept into the air and just let the crowd carry us for awhile. Though I lost him multiple times and he was so nervous he started scratching an imaginary “owie” until it bled, having subjected him to such madness made me even more determined to find jackets. I basically bought everything I was able to touch with my hands, including two warm-ish coats costing 4 euro each, and we were out the door after 12 minutes, with a full bag. Cake was out of the question but this time Leo didn’t mind.
Sunny playground, dismal people: Also in our wealthy neighborhood, just inside the city forest and a seven-minute walk from our apartment, there’s a clearing with a playground where Leo and Marco have spent a sizeable chunk of their infancy/youth: the Sonnenspielplatz, or sunny playground. Each first Saturday morning of the month they hold a very small, relaxed Kinderbazaar, right near the playground’s “Forest Café”, famous for its cranky help and burnt lattes. When Marco was first born, we bought lots of clothes for him here, as we were often on the playground early on Saturday mornings anyway, trying to entertain a jealous Leo and get an unhappy Marco to stop crying (those were the days :)!). Then we stopped going, probably out of PTSD, or because the sellers are not very pleasant. They are particularly untrusting of Fernando (he’s not exactly blond), and don’t like him fingering the goods or letting Leo try something on before paying.
But we stumbled on the monthly bazaar again this past weekend. It was a cool and sunny morning. The yuppies held their coffees in one hand and their babies in the other, chatting away. Ever notice how some people throw their heads back when they laugh and some don’t? Well, these people did.
There were only a few tables, but boy, did they have treasures that morning! A skinny blond with long hair in a ponytail and frosty lipstick stood guarding her impossibly appropriate wares: a pile of warm clothes in Leo’s size, puzzles and even a wooden memory game that just the day before I had been thinking about for him. I was salivating over everything on her table when Marco bumped his upper lip on the pavement and let out a wail, needing some attention. Standing to the side a bit with Marco, I asked Fernando to go over and buy the Memory game for 4€. When Fernando pulled out a 20, Skinny blond ponytail confessed she didn’t have exact change. I then moved back over and offered to buy more things so that she’d be able to make change. I held up a few possibilities –a mini rucksack, a Bob the Builder work studio, a puzzle, a vest… until we found the perfect combination of items to equal 10 € so that we could get a 10 in change. So she took the 20€ Fernando handed her and commented that she had already given us the 10 (when she hadn’t... why would she have, before the sale?). We told her she had not yet given us anything. She insisted. To be nice, we looked in our empty pockets, Fernando fanned his wallet in front of her eyes. No 10 €. She insisted again that her 10 € was gone, and how very strange that was. She walked around her table, dramatically searching for it. We were now irritated and Fernando requested to terminate the transaction. She replied, “No, because then you’d have your 20 and my 10, too”. She was accusing us of scamming her out of 10 € at a kiddie sale. It was part maddening, but also hurtful. Our impulse was to hightail it out of there, but we kept shopping and held our heads high with the other salespeople, all of whom had witnessed the incident. The last thing she told us as, we rushed away in disgust, was to give her back her ten euro “when we found it”. The Memory game remains untouched and the vest hangs in Leo’s room like an insult, but he loves his Bob the Builder work studio.
I think we’ve had enough of Kinderbazaars for awhile. So what, in the end, does this all say? That Germans hold on to their stuff for longer than Americans. That they are less generous with it. That the “customer is always right” doesn’t extend to amateur German salespeople. That there are deals and gems to be had, but never without a price. On a lighter note, I suppose what it also says is, wow, I do love a good bargain, no matter where we are living.
Kinderbazaars: These second-hand sales for kids’ clothes, toys and accessories—advertised on flyers and most common in spring and fall—have been on my radar since moving here. When we first arrived, it was September, and memories of the second-hand extravanganzas at the southern baptist churches were still fresh. Those Georgia church rec rooms would fill to bursting, with toys still in their boxes, strollers, kids’ furniture, books in shrinkwrap, clothes still with tags, all at rock-bottom prices. So it was a shock to show up at my first German Kinderbazaar at a YMCA-type place and see the sparse sale tables laid with neatly folded, faded clothes, old toys in crates, board games, and stacks of puzzles, all manned by dour salespeople. There was less selection, less room to move about, and the merchandise was more worn. The most tempting part was the Coffee and Cake buffet. But prices were good and, in addition to cake, I bought plenty of clothes, partly in an effort to dress Leo more like a German child. Some hits were a pair of navy sweats for 50 cents that he still wears to gymnastics class, and a preppy, English style hunting parka that we gleefully discovered had an old chestnut in one pocket and some other toddler’s pacifier in the other. But I stopped going to them for a long time, until recently, when I learned the unspoken rule of these Kinderbazaars: the richer the neighborhood, the better the Bazaar.
Mosh pit at St. Elizabeth’s: Not only is St. Elizabeth’s a catholic Kindergarten—meaning that most of the kids who go there have parents who choose to pay the optional 10% tithe—it’s in one of the best parts of the city, umm, just a few blocks from our house. You did know we live next door to the ex-Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder, didn’t you? Yeah, well, his kid, from his 4th marriage, goes to this Kindergarten. You get the picture. All the moms had been talking about the St. Elizabeth sale for weeks. The cake alone was legend. It was to start at 2:00 on a Sunday and both boys needed winter coats so I was going to give it a shot. When Leo and I arrived at 1:50, the line was snaking around an entire block, a heterogeneous mix of tall blondes with 7even Jeans and brown leather riding boots (the locals), loud Russian ladies with bright lipstick, and subdued Muslim families. Most of the parents with children had them strapped to their bodies, and I soon learned why. The cramped sale space, spread over two floors, was so crowded and chaotic with the bargain-hungry, so few of whom favored deodorant, that Leo and I lept into the air and just let the crowd carry us for awhile. Though I lost him multiple times and he was so nervous he started scratching an imaginary “owie” until it bled, having subjected him to such madness made me even more determined to find jackets. I basically bought everything I was able to touch with my hands, including two warm-ish coats costing 4 euro each, and we were out the door after 12 minutes, with a full bag. Cake was out of the question but this time Leo didn’t mind.
Sunny playground, dismal people: Also in our wealthy neighborhood, just inside the city forest and a seven-minute walk from our apartment, there’s a clearing with a playground where Leo and Marco have spent a sizeable chunk of their infancy/youth: the Sonnenspielplatz, or sunny playground. Each first Saturday morning of the month they hold a very small, relaxed Kinderbazaar, right near the playground’s “Forest Café”, famous for its cranky help and burnt lattes. When Marco was first born, we bought lots of clothes for him here, as we were often on the playground early on Saturday mornings anyway, trying to entertain a jealous Leo and get an unhappy Marco to stop crying (those were the days :)!). Then we stopped going, probably out of PTSD, or because the sellers are not very pleasant. They are particularly untrusting of Fernando (he’s not exactly blond), and don’t like him fingering the goods or letting Leo try something on before paying.
But we stumbled on the monthly bazaar again this past weekend. It was a cool and sunny morning. The yuppies held their coffees in one hand and their babies in the other, chatting away. Ever notice how some people throw their heads back when they laugh and some don’t? Well, these people did.
There were only a few tables, but boy, did they have treasures that morning! A skinny blond with long hair in a ponytail and frosty lipstick stood guarding her impossibly appropriate wares: a pile of warm clothes in Leo’s size, puzzles and even a wooden memory game that just the day before I had been thinking about for him. I was salivating over everything on her table when Marco bumped his upper lip on the pavement and let out a wail, needing some attention. Standing to the side a bit with Marco, I asked Fernando to go over and buy the Memory game for 4€. When Fernando pulled out a 20, Skinny blond ponytail confessed she didn’t have exact change. I then moved back over and offered to buy more things so that she’d be able to make change. I held up a few possibilities –a mini rucksack, a Bob the Builder work studio, a puzzle, a vest… until we found the perfect combination of items to equal 10 € so that we could get a 10 in change. So she took the 20€ Fernando handed her and commented that she had already given us the 10 (when she hadn’t... why would she have, before the sale?). We told her she had not yet given us anything. She insisted. To be nice, we looked in our empty pockets, Fernando fanned his wallet in front of her eyes. No 10 €. She insisted again that her 10 € was gone, and how very strange that was. She walked around her table, dramatically searching for it. We were now irritated and Fernando requested to terminate the transaction. She replied, “No, because then you’d have your 20 and my 10, too”. She was accusing us of scamming her out of 10 € at a kiddie sale. It was part maddening, but also hurtful. Our impulse was to hightail it out of there, but we kept shopping and held our heads high with the other salespeople, all of whom had witnessed the incident. The last thing she told us as, we rushed away in disgust, was to give her back her ten euro “when we found it”. The Memory game remains untouched and the vest hangs in Leo’s room like an insult, but he loves his Bob the Builder work studio.
I think we’ve had enough of Kinderbazaars for awhile. So what, in the end, does this all say? That Germans hold on to their stuff for longer than Americans. That they are less generous with it. That the “customer is always right” doesn’t extend to amateur German salespeople. That there are deals and gems to be had, but never without a price. On a lighter note, I suppose what it also says is, wow, I do love a good bargain, no matter where we are living.
posted by J&F at 4:36 AM
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