Tag: Flea Market

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The Chronicles of Kardboard?

Yeah, we’re still working on that name.

04/15

Did a restock on Opus X. For TCG Player and eBay.

04/16

After I dropped the kids off at school, I decided to head straight to the Flea Market. I didn’t expect to find much, Wednesdays are usually not that great over there. And, I’m sure glad I did. Plenty of Video Games, Consoles, and Controllers.

Spent the rest of the day testing everything we picked up. And, started listing everything as well. I’d say we sold about 50% of it in the first 24 hours.

04/17

It’s Thursday, and it’s Spring, that means there should be garage sales out there! That means, I’m going sailing! But, there was only one problem. No Garage Sales in sight.

I drove around the usual route I would take. No Signs. Nothing. Just a barren wasteland, and signs for the local elections that happened about 2 weeks ago.

Had nothing much going on for the rest of the day, decided to take the kids to Bachelor’s Grove. It’s an old haunted cemetery. With the graves dating back to the 1800s. It’s a nice little walk and you get to take a glimpse at the history of the local communities.

04/18

Expired SEC.

Spent the morning with HostGator, trying to resolve the issue. They took care of it, so the site is back up. Well, of course it is. You’re reading this on the website.

After that, we restocked Opus XI on TCG Player and eBay.

04/19

Had my seven year old put together orders with me. I had her find the cards, put them in sleeves and toploaders, sign her name on the thank you note, and put the card in the envelope. Took us about five to ten minutes fro each card. But, she’s getting better at it.

04/20

It was Pascha (Greek Easter), we took the day off to cook food and spend time with our family.

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Back On Getting Side-Tracked

Now, where did we leave off?

We did get sidetracked with Tears of the Planet, and everything that came with it. But, now it seams like everything is back on track. For the most part. Running a business feels like it’s a train wreck waiting to happen. We just have to make sure that when things go wrong, we can steer that train back on the tracks. Hopefully we can avoid the wreck and go around it.

And, that’s what we have been doing for the last 6 and a half years.

6.5 Years?

It seems like yesterday.

We started off with an eBay store. I just checked the date too. Nov-26-2018.

It took us quite a while to get that first sale. But, it finally came, and slowly Kardboard Korner began to grow.

I don’t even know how I got to talking about the begining, but I remember that we had gone to the Flea Market, and found some Pokemon packs selling for a dollar. I thought to myself, how are they getting them so cheap that they can sell them for a dollar each. This was back when packs were going 3 for $10 at your local LGS.

Some of you might have already read this story before, and yes those packs were fake.

As you can see, we can get sidetracked pretty easily.

And, I just spent 2 hours looking at Japanese Vending Machines, trying to find a purveyor for Japanese stickers and cards. I’ve been meaning to change up the Sticker Machine at the store with something a little more unique. It seams like everywhere I go that has vending machines, it’s always the same stickers and tattoos that are in there.

Most of them aren’t even worth putting in. The only thing that really moves is the Pokemon card section. I could easily have put in a bunch of bulk, but I decided on Double Rares and anything unique that I can get for around a quarter. Luckily I managed to get a good deal on some Japanese EX cards, and those have people coming in just for the cards. I see people drop in 5 dollars at a time, trying to “Catch ‘Em All”.

Back on the Japanese stickers and cards, I haven’t found anyone selling them.

I’ll keep looking though.

Selling? kardboardkorner@gmail.com

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It Was A Good Day

The alarm goes off, It’s 5 in the morning and I need to get ready.

Sunday Mornings are meant for sleeping in.

Not today, we have to give the flea market another shot. Last Saturday sucked, but it could have been multiple reasons for that.

Slowly crawl out of bed, and what we need is Coffee. Plenty of it.

Then it’s time to load up the truck, and we’re off.

Wait in line, get inside, set up.

It’s cloudy but the weather says it’s not going to rain.

Plenty of foot traffic, already seeing some people I know. Making sales, I’m starting to think the flea market isn’t that bad. It’s actually going great today.

Que the Eurythmics.

“Here’s comes the rain again.”

It didn’t rain that hard, but when you have Kardboard all over your tables with nothing to cover everything, you got to move quick. Started throwing everything back in the truck. Found a giant blanket and just threw it on everything. We got to save everything.

Now we’re here standing under the hood of the trunk just people watching. The rain lasted about an hour and some of the other vendors were already leaving. I thought about it, but the weather did say no rain. So, I took my chances and set everything back up again.

It didn’t rain again which was good, and the traffic started rolling again.

90% sold was Pokemon, which is understandable. And, I got rid of somethings that I thought would never sell.

Win/Win for me.

Now it’s time to figure out where we’ll be next weekend. If we can’t find anything we’ll be back at the Swap-O-Rama in Alsip.

Shop for Singles & more at our TCG Player Store.

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Bad Cards, or Bad Decisions

How did this all start?

Well, I guess it was one day that we had gone to the flea market. And we found some Pokemon cards, going for a dollar a pack. I don’t care what kind of cards they are, (not to knock Pokemon or anything) but at a dollar a pack I’ll be buying it. My first thought was that if they can sell them for a dollar, how cheap are they getting them. There must be some money in that, I can buy these dollar packs and sell them for two, and double my money.

We ended up buying a bunch of packs, Easy Money. Or, so I thought. When we got back to the house, we cracked those packs to see what we got. I noticed right away that the quality was terrible. I was thinking, this Pokemon company is printing this garbage and charging top dollar for it? I always knew it was mostly for kids but, come on. Some of these are even blurry, where’s the quality control?

I didn’t  realize it at the moment, but I knew something was wrong. So, I grabbed my sons Pokemon cards and took a closer look. They looked nothing like the cards I had just bought. These are all Fake. How could they do that to me? Who would have thought that they’d be selling fake cards at the Flea Market.

Lesson learned. But, at least I got off cheap. All I Spent was 4 bucks on those packs. And, a lesson. It was pretty easy to spot the differences once they’re next to each other, but sometimes you can tell right away just by looking at the cards. I spotted some fake cards in my Godson’s binder just flipping through the pages. I asked him what he traded for a certain card and was disappointed when he said he gave a Full Art for it. The word Fake on the bottom didn’t have much meaning after all.