Florida Chick Goes Bargain Hunting

When I think flea market, I generally think of some HGTV show where they take a rickety old chair and turn it into a great shabby chic piece for under $20.00...or that show on PBS where the British brothers tell the little old lady that the ceramic vase she picked up last weekend is actually worth $18,000. So when I headed to the Mardi Gras Casino flea market this afternoon with Kaitlyn and her friend Lena, I was slightly surprised not to find more antiques...instead I found kiosks with giant underwear, used fur coats, and various vases that probably came free with a delivery of valentine carnations in 1984.

Once we discovered that the big plastic sunglasses from the 70's were the closest thing to an antique that we were going to find, we settled on a different mission: to find the tackiest item in the flea market and buy it. It was a difficult task finding the tackiest item, there was just too much to choose from. In our top 5 were a giant tie-dye painted ashtray, a collectors plate with a painting of Daddy Warbucks, a pink ceramic bird thing, a velvet tiger painting, and a portable toilet seat. But number one, (even tackier than the toilet seat) was a paper mache hippopotamus (painted like a giraffe) with a purple and gold kente cloth sack for a body and red paper mache feet...asking price? $5.00. I wish I would have had my camera because the description doesn't do it justice...it was just ugly...and confusing - a hippo in a sack? with giraffe spots? It couldn't even sit up because it didn't have a body...maybe you could hang it on the wall...

Anyway, we decided to buy the hippo, and being the expert HGTV watcher, I knew the rules...bid low, hold your poker face, and pretend that you're going to walk away if they don't meet your price. Apparently this works better in theory, because the minute I offered $1.00, the man glared at me with an evil eye (this does not happen on HGTV) and yelled to his wife in the back of the stall in a language I didn't understand..."$10.00" she yelled back. Now, I don't think I know all of the negotiating rules because I offered $2.00 next and pointed out that $10.00 was ridiculous because the original price was only $5.00. I think that maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if I had stopped there...but in my HGTV inspired overconfidence I also added, "cmon, no one else is going to buy this." I think that might have been the icing on the cake because from the back of the stall came the wife's voice yelling, "put it back, you go away and put it back." Kaitlyn, Lena and I put the paper mache hippo down and booked it out of there.

In the end, I came home with nothing from the flea market but shaken negotiating confidence and a little bit of resentment towards HGTV. Seriously, if you're going to offer flea market advice, please double check the South Florida rules because honestly, like everything else, they are a little different down here. I actually had fun hanging with the girls today and I even got an ab workout laughing about the portable toilet and the giant underwear. I can only hope that at the end of the day the ugly hippo didn't actually belong to some minor royalty and that it's actually worth $18,000...or, maybe I can hope that it is worth $18,000 and someone bought it for $5.00...and is now hanging it on the wall of their double-wide.