A Saga of Flea Market Woes (or: Ohio Americans, Part 2)
Well, I took the hour-and-a-half drive south from Columbus to Monroe, OH, today with my wife and we visited the Turtle Creek Flea Market.
First of all, WOW! What an utterly amazing sight! That place is freakin' huge!
Okay, that said, on to the topic at hand:
As reported, there are no less than five (5) video game stores, although a good deal of them appeared suspiciously similar to one another. Every place that had games had a meager but fair selection of NES and SNES titles. Genesis titles were found in numbers comparable to the other machines titles and one booth even sold Genesis sports titles for $.50 a cart (goes to show just how unpopular or common those things are).
Sadly, only one booth had any Jaguar games and, though I did not actually see a Tempest 2000 cart, I'm fairly certain that, given the selection of carts that were visible, one could have been found fairly easily in that stack. But, of what good is a cart without the console to play it on? Sadly again, the well-meaning, but obviously otherwise disinterested, youngster behind the counter only had one Jaguar console in his booth. When I asked for a price on that console, I was informed that this was a "display unit" and not for sale as it was really the only unit the owner of the booth had. The young man then returned to the arduous task of staring at lint on the floor. BAH! I say! I don't understand what the point of showing a machine is if you are not going to offer it for sale. Is it all merely to cause one to hope against hope that one's personal Holy Grail can be in sight, perhaps even held, but never truly owned by any man save he who has the greater power of being the Flea Market booth renter? Disheartened, but not defeated, I continued on from this booth of disillusionment with hopes of discovering another source for this treasure elsewhere, though the source was never found in the end.
After this tragic episode, I determined to focus my general energies elsewhere. Perhaps an old NES and a cart or two would present themselves for my acquisition, I thought. This secondary search of my mine, very much unlike the first, turned up many offers. It seems that NES consoles can be had almost by the dozen, one booth even had a sizeable literal stack of them from floor to counter-height. The little grey "toasters" were everywhere, and everywhere they were an insane rip-off. $40!?!?! for a machine that is more than half as old as me? Now, we're not talking about clean, well-cared-for units that might garner a top-dollar price simply for their solid condition. I'm talking about units that look like they just came out of under a pile of old clothes and porn magazines in someone's attic, basement, or storeroom closet. Now, certainly there wasn't a one among these units that couldn't have been re-furbished with a little tender, loving care and a touch of technical skill, but if I am going to have to take the unit home, disassemble it, clean it, make minor repairs to it, and then put the whole thing back together again and make it work, I am not going to give anybody more than a couple of dollars for what otherwise is nothing more than a mausoleum for cockroaches who gave up their life force when Duran Duran was still a top ten band. For $40 or less I could have easily just gone to the local mega-mall and looked up some guy named Ahmed or Habib and purchased one of his illicit Famiclones to partake of some of that good old retro-joy on. Needless to say, I spent the greater part of my day asking prices on old NES units and shaking my head at the demands of sellers who apparently needed the exhorbitant amounts of cash they were seeking to buy new sets of teeth to fill in the few gaps around the one or two teeth they actually did have in their heads.
Overall, as usual, while the finds to be found are extraordinary in many places, it seems like everyone and their brother has been going to EBay and finding what the most ridiculously high price a fool paid for a product was and then they come to the Flea Market with their pile of garbage and demand that we pay them the same ridiculous amounts for their crap while claiming "That's what it's going for on EBay." BAH! I say! I am not some FOOL with money to burn!!! I work an honest day for an honest wage and I want to get honest value for the money I spend as it does not come easily. Oh, I know that Flea Markets aren't necessarily the shining stars of the Better Business Bureau, I'm also not going to be shanghai'd into paying two and three times more for an item than what it is worth.
My wife and I found lots of neat stuff for our home and for the nursery we are building. A friend of ours, an exchange student from Zimbabwe, found many neat items to decorate her college dorm room. I picked up a great compilation of Spanish hip-hop tunes (I am Mexican, after all) for myself. All in all, we had a great time. It was just that the things that I had really wanted to get were all just so ridiculously over-price and not in any kind of a decent condition for the amount they were asking.
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Keep the faith. Stuff is out there. I haven't found anything worthy in nearly a year. And though it wasn't a bumper crop of actual "games," it was indeed a bounty of retrogaming goodness.
Originally Posted by Querjek
