Being an avid secondhand shopper, I have built up a cache of friends from all corners who share my passion of hunting for odd collectibles. I often take visiting folks to our numerous respectable and affordable shops: Tickled Pink Memorabilia Mall, Greenhaus, Crazy Daisy Antique Mall. There we can find colorful board games, albums neatly organized by genre, and the occasional kitschy zodiac trivet. With items all clear of dirt and bad karma, and prices clearly marked, these stores offer purveyed treasure on display for the shopper to pick like fruit at the market.
And then there are Peddler’s Malls.
When I walk into a Peddler’s Mall, I prepare for chaos. And I’m both relieved and disappointed if it doesn’t deliver. Peddler’s Malls are a different type of flea market, a used superstore with a hint of antique mall, but overwhelmingly flavored with a giant, rudderless yard sale. They are unique to our region, with the first store opening in the old Walmart on Outer Loop in 1997. Traderbaker Malls and, most recently, Vendors’ Villages have sprung up as competition, but all these stores follow the same model. Find an empty big box store and fill it to the brim with Americana, whether it’s a lead-backed mirror from the attic or a forgotten waterlogged box of records from the basement. Stay open seven days a week for long hours and employ anonymous cashiers to type out every item name while offering no expertise. Then sit back and let the money roll in.
Photos by Brett Marhall/Kertis Creative.
These stores make for an adventure in repurposing for the vendor and buyer alike. Did you think those unopened and ugly disposable coasters from 1973 were garbage? Well, they make great magnets! Do you have leftover plastic piping from that bathroom project? Maybe Squallis Puppeteers can use it for their latest puppets.
Photos by Brett Marhall/Kertis Creative.
This always leads to the inevitable overpricing of junk, when spare coffee pots are priced at five times their unopened price, leaving this shopper to wonder how some vendors are able to pay their rent. With a standard rate of $120 a month for a 10-by-10 space, plus a small commission to pay to the owners, vendors have to be shrewd to last long. They must follow the same marketing guidelines as any store owner: Watch what sells, abandon what doesn’t, and always rotate product. In Kentucky, we are used to a depressed economy and used to the need for secondhand value for our Walmart junk. As the nation’s economy struggles along, people look up from the expensively cheap garbage they have accumulated and wonder where their money went. There is something harsh about this naked re-evaluating of past decisions.
My grandparents presented to me a world where trash is a resource, something to be tapped and marketed. I spent my childhood going to dump sites around Henry County, looking for metal that my grandpa would sell for scrap. Every weekend, my grandma and I would roam the countryside, driving from yard sale to yard sale, meeting strangers over boxes of broken toys and jewelry, searching, searching. As an adult, nothing – not a visit to the Shelby County Flea Market, yard sales in St. Matthews, or leisurely strolls through Crazy Daisy Antique Mall – quite brings up the correct formula of nostalgia for this time, composed of unease and excitement, possibility and disbelief, as a trip to the Peddler’s Mall. This feeling isn’t for everyone, as my tortured friends can attest. And I mourn the loss of the countryside yard sale, as people less and less invite strangers into their driveways, insisting instead on inhabiting these empty shells of the cheap prosperity of the past, a Walmart here, a Winn-Dixie there. For a
couple of months, they can act like store purveyors, without knowing their community of buyers, and still suffer all the shoplifting.
Photos by Brett Marhall/Kertis Creative.
Photos by Brett Marhall/Kertis Creative.
With more than 20 stores in our region and the newest one growing in Indianapolis, Peddler’s Malls are spreading beyond the Kentucky/Southern Indiana border. It will be interesting to see how the average Yankee displays their discards. What flavor will they bring to the mix? Clam? I bet there will be less Aunt Jemima dolls.
For those of you who like your shopping trips to be clean and relatively sober, take a day trip to Elizabethtown or visit the Middletown location. If you prefer to wear latex gloves while shopping, all the while contemplating the decline of the American Dream, the Dixie Highway and Hillview locations are for you. For the most consistently high trash-to-treasure ratio, check out the Outer Loop and Lexington stores. Visit buypeddlersmall.com and see if there is a location near you.
Happy hunting!
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