Flea markets and Sunday closing.

For a few years after we moved to Massachusetts in the early 1980s the state was among the few remaining that restricted commercial retail activity on Sundays, historically supporting workers against exploitation. Western states largely had abandoned the practice by the 1970s. The laws did allow sales activity by individuals as private sellers, leading to thriving markets of individual sellers buying, trading and selling - usually used or secondary market merchandise. It became a thriving ancillary economy, but it was tax-evasive and understandably opposed by brick-and-mortar retail business interests. Sunday closing laws died of irrelevance in 1983, but the secondary economy that they fostered continued strong for another decade or so.

The Sunday commercial activity in closed states was yard sale plugged in. Large parking lots, old factories and vacant warehouses were repurposed for a few hours for private vendors doing business the way its been done for several thousand years. A few such enterprises continue, but their social value waned without the policies that closed almost all other shopping and restricted Sunday employment. Certainly there isn't the scale of economy those markets provided.

In populous areas there were many roadside stands and groups of vendors in larger venues, open only on Sunday when the vendors were free from their regular employment. They opened early in the morning and were packing up after lunch. Parking lots of closed shopping centers and closed factories and businesses were markets for a few hours each week. A few of the more established markets continue today, but the large populist activity has long passed.

Brimfield Antique Flea Market.

This was widespread practice in Sunday-closing states, and eventually gave rise to a thriving Memorial Day-to-Labor Day flea market and perpetual yard sale strip in local stretches from north of Boston all the way down old Route 1 to North Carolina and Florida.

When we first moved to the region from the central states in 1983, we thought the Sunday closing laws were annoyingly backward and inconvenient. You do learn quickly to plan activities and shopping around it. Without alternatives, one can learn to like it. It was a true time out, and many of those busy things of life were put on hold for the day. The laws were intended to protect workers, including retail, but the social environment evolved when everybody wanted Sunday shopping and Sunday pay. The demise of the closing laws altered the agenda of the day on Sunday for most families and the small vendor markets faded.

In moving to Massachusetts we were in on the tail end of the practice and find ourselves a bit nostalgic today for that secondary retail activity as entertainment, and as a source for interesting and somewhat unique goods. Conversations and banter with vendors often were part of the experience.

One needed not to go far. There were notable large venues, such as a defunct dog track in Taunton (which burned down in 2001), closed factories (of which we had many in the region, since razed), large parking lots of Sunday-closed businesses, as well as many residential perpetual yard sales where permitted. The Taunton market had scores of vendors on the two concourses, the services ground floor, and outdoors on the track apron and parking lot where they spread blankets. This was as close as one can get to the historic early bazaars. Vendors also typically haggled, and goods were always buyer-beware.

There also were many smaller venues of perhaps a dozen vendors. Some were categorically focused, such as jewelry and small items and others more furniture or more glassware and ceramics. These more specialized bazaars typically were open on Saturday rather than Sunday morning, and occupied old vacant factory buildings and church basements. These businesses also have dwindled to scarce.

In 1983 Massachusetts began to free up commercial Sunday retail and the markets gradually eroded to a few year-round indoor markets by the late 1990s, brief holiday markets, summer vendor fairs at local festivals, and big events like the week-long Brimfield Antique Show in central Massachusetts three times a summer. Many people now worked Sundays, and it became a regular shopping day for most others. When it comes to flea market as a market, shopping as entertainment and opportunity for unique goods, and Sunday as a non-workday, it is a sad loss.

Other fairs with used and antique vendors that travel are spaced through the season, similar to Brimfield but much smaller, and there are several one-off holiday fairs. Those holiday vendors often aren't local and the sales are almost exclusively new, artist craft, or valued antique goods.

These are quite different from the local flea markets, such as the modest one in Raynham each Sunday morning that still thrives. Once there were a half-dozen substantial markets within 20 miles: small vendors, used goods, oddball goods, "antiques," and they were worth a couple visits each year. Today, one must know about the few remaining and where to find them. They're still worth an occasional visit if the goods change, particularly if one is a collector of anything.

This is a personal lament of the kind of progress that diminishes civic life in favor of churn. We reduce our interaction by buying online. We lose the social mingling of market shoppers and vendors. We miss the opportunity to engage actively with a vendor over price. And we retreat into a world of doing our own picking and even our own scanning to evade a vacant clerk. For the most part, we just don't have time for all that.

I have no bon mot here. We rarely visit a Sunday market because the entertainment value is no longer worth the effort or the loss of a sleep-in. We don't really need things. For collecting and trading, remaining markets probably are sufficient. The ramped-up, Amazon/ebay-driven retail space competes with Walmart/Target for our consumer shopping dollar for both new and old goods. The appeal of the old, odd, unusual has faded in favor a few special things. The world has changed, and after 30 years, it probably should.

Scenemaker, 19 July 2017