One
person's trash...
Sunday at the Nipomo swap meet.
STORY BY BRANDI STANSBURY
PHOTOS BY CHRIS GARDNER
 |
PARTY DOWN
|
Tired of corporate superstores? Tired of walking into the grim fluorescent lighting of equally grim department stores and feeling the need to spend money on things you don't need? Tired of long lines and paying suggested retail price? If so, there's hope, and a better way.
The Nipomo Swap Meet and Flea Market sits on the west side of Highway 101 in the Nipomo Mini Storage lot. With more than 450 vendors, you're surely able to find anything your heart desires. Or, you may find something you really don't need.
Like most swap meets, Nipomo's market offers shoppers an overwhelming choice of products to buy-from functional items such as pots and pans and tools to decorative knives, electric keyboards, accordions, bras, and panties.
 |
A predominant Mexican influence at the swap meet invites an abundance of cultural icons such as the many Virgin Guadalupe wares. From jackets to bedspreads to car seat covers, your whole life can be outfitted with the sacred Virgin of Mexico. |
Also sold on the grounds are videos of Mexican cockfights. They sell for $10 and include multiple bouts between some of Mexico's top fighting roosters. The videos give viewers a firsthand look at the application of the razor blades onto the cocks' claws, slow-motion shots of pivotal fight moments, amazing use of their editing program's transition options; front-row betters; and beat up, dying birds.
Hidden gems abound. Used chaps, huge plastic raspberries with drink holders on them, bat bags, and antique Polaroid cameras are buried and great finds for junk collectors. Luckily, there's no longer a Babysitter's Club Trivia game for sale. A lucky shopper picked that up after bargaining a vendor down from $5 to $2.
BY KAT DEBAKKER
Unlike other flea markets, the Nipomo Swap Meet is unique in its aura of permanence. It doesn't occupy the lot of a drive-in theater; it has its own signage, its own parking kiosk, and its own permanent "stores" in corrugated-metal storage units with roll-up doors. Most of its vendors seem to be steadfast regulars, setting up "shop" every weekend for weeks, months, or even years.
What appeared to be a typical Sunday early afternoon found Latino toddlers running about underfoot, wearing frilly white dresses and carrying clear plastic bags of chicharrones; tarps spread with the requisite flea-market assortment of rusted drill bits, shovels, and used tool belts; aging Latino women in pastel sweats displaying outdated Avon products. The air smelled like a thousand garage doors all opened at once. Table upon table of imported knockoffs were so depressingly cheap-misshapen dolls with stickers for eyes, packages of "big man" polyester bikini briefs, barrettes adorned with locks of cascading plastic doll hair-they made Dollar Tree look like Bloomingdales.
 |
SHINY AND NEW |
One plot featured approximately 30 cardboard banana boxes in neat rows, all filled with "Fabuloso" cleaning supplies.
Another, along the back fence, featured an assortment of dirty, hole-filled jeans and truck wheels; tires sold separately.
Booth displays ran the gamut, from the useful-produce, snow cones, hard-to-find Mexican spices, and tacos-to the humorously absurd.
One display, under a blue tarp roof, featured an assortment of dolls with names along the lines of "Sucking Baby-My Favorite" and "Cheerful Karen with her Pink Pillow."
One of the storage units housed an upholstery shop whose main business appeared to be reupholstering expensive antique chairs, without a hint of irony, in burnt orange and nubby-surfaced avocado fabrics circa 1974. One item of particular interest in the shop was a combination ottoman-trampoline, upholstered in lime green, with helpful diagrams indicating how the top cushion can be removed to reveal-surprise!-a short-legged trampoline approximately five feet in diameter. "Great for kids," read the tag.
 |
FOOD FOR THOUGHT |
The majority of sellers were unwilling to bargain, knowing from experience that someone would pay the price they wanted. One man stood proudly behind a table of incense "smoking bottles"; essentially empty beer bottles with holes drilled in the side.
"The drilling's tough to do," he said, holding up a decorative green bottle made of thick Mexican glass, the kind that often comes adorned with a cardboard tag and filled with bath salts or bath oil. "Especially when you have a really special one, like this. You don't want to break it." The price was $8.95.
Anyone who had something to sell was indeed selling it. One booth had been converted into a haircutting shop that seemed to be at no loss for a steady stream of customers. Two places were selling parakeets and finches along with $10 cages and a 72-hour guarantee. Several booths plastered with posters of Mexican pop stars featured only Spanish-music CDs. To say the least, it is a spectacle no SLO County resident can afford to miss. ³
 |
|
Staff Writer Brandi Stansbury can be reached at stansbury@newtimesslo.com.
Associate Editor Kat DeBakker can be reached kdebakker@newtimesslo.com
 |
