Brimfield reminiscences, continued

My recent ramble on the state of the antiques market post-eBay started out with the Brimfield antiques market, but didn't really end up discussing Brimfield per se. So here we go. . .

Brimfield isn't a single market, but rather an agglomeration of independently-run fields clustered around the main road running through the town. Even before the Internet began to change things, Brimfield had been going through major changes all on its own.

Perhaps the biggest shift began when dealers began moving from field to field. Many years ago, the norm was for dealers to rent a space in a field and to remain set up there for several days, often camping out. Now not all fields opened at the same time: rather, openings were staggered across several days, most fields opening between Tuesday and Thursday. Brimfield is a big place, so buyers tended to follow the openings, looking to pounce as fresh merch was being put out. And as time went by, the serious buyers stopped coming back after the initial rush, leaving dealers sitting around in quiet fields populated largely by wandering tire-kickers (no offense intended to sightseeing amateurs, but the fact is, 80% of a dealer's sales in any multiday event will be on the first day, and usually early on). In response, dealers started moving from field to field, following (or rather, keeping ahead of) the wave of buyers.

Promoters benefited from this, of course, but buyers began to get increasingly frustrated as "fresh" fields grew increasingly filled with merchandise that had already been picked over on previous days. This was annoying, but what really began to drive off the buyers was the increasing number of fields fenced off by promoters so they could charge admission. The admission fees themselves didn't drive off anyone: it was that one now had to wait until the designated opening hour before the gates were opened -- allowing dealers set up in the field (and those who had managed to wangle extra passes) to get first crack at all the goodies, leaving little for those not so privileged. The promoters could have profitably dealt with the problem by openly selling early admission passes, but for some reason this was not done.

Such a situation is the kiss of death for a wholesale market, which Brimfield has always been. But perhaps the field owners and event promoters lost sight of this, thinking -- as have many show organizers before them -- that dealers could be neglected in favor of retail buyers (who then never seemed to materialize in sufficient numbers). In any event, many serious buyers soon got tired of watching through the chain link fencing while others cleaned out the fields they were waiting to get into. Nearly ten years ago I stopped bothering with fields I couldn't get into early, paying the usual under-the-table price of $50 for a spare pass. And that $50 was pennies on the dollar in terms of what it allowed me to buy in the hour or so before opening, an hour that guaranteed my competitors would be left nearly empty-handed.

Nonetheless, more often than not I could not snag a pass, so the incentive to keep shopping hard steadily faded. There were a couple of fields that were run differently, however. The exact details varied, but the basic idea was the same: until opening time, no one was allowed to set up, buy, or sell, so that all buyers were given the same chance at the merchandise. Those fields continued to be a big draw, even as many of the other newly-fenced fields' allure was fading. Yet one couldn't get beyond the fact that none of the fair-shot fields opened on Tuesday, the first day; so that while one did get an equal chance there, there too one was increasingly confronted by dealers who had already set up in another field the day before, and sometimes in yet another field the day before that.

All this happened before eBay's market penetration hit the tipping point, which for most smaller items came around 1998-1999. Brimfield's problems insured that it would be unable to offer even the slightest challenge to the migration of wholesale trade online, but the end result was probably inevitable no matter what the show promoters had done. Brimfield still draws big crowds, and money is still being made. Furniture, along with other items that are inconvenient to ship and more easily evaluated in person, remains a staple there, and good deals still turn up -- albeit vastly fewer. But overall, for someone like me, specializing in smaller items, the situation is grim. Piles of reproductions, imports, and "craft" goods, tables full of eBay rejects, display cases loaded with ordinary items offered at full retail -- no wonder that of the many colleagues from years past, virtually all have abandoned Brimfield entirely, even though they are all still in the business, and as active as ever.

Is the general public aware of this? I rather doubt it. It's a similar situation in London, where the venerable Portobello market is moribund as a working antiques venue, yet is now one of the top dozen tourist attractions in the UK.

FOLLOWUP: I ran into one of the veteran local dealers a few weeks after this post, and asked him if he had gone to Brimfield (noting that not so many years back, such a question would have been of the bear-in-the-woods variety). He said he had gone for three days, had looked at everything thoroughly, and had bought nothing but lunch.

Posted by David on May 19, 2003 3:03 PM