A car boot sale is a temporary open-air market, usually in a field or a large car park, at which private individuals sell their unwanted possessions directly from the backs of their cars. The boot is the trunk, which is where the name comes from.
How it works
Sellers pay a few pounds for a pitch, drive in, open the boot, put out a wallpaper table and lay everything on it. Buyers wander between cars, haggle, and pay cash.
There is no vetting and almost no organisation beyond a man in a hi-vis jacket collecting pitch fees and directing traffic. That is the entire appeal on both sides: sellers clear a garage in a morning, and buyers get an unpredictable field of other people’s belongings at very low prices.
The timings
This is the part that matters and that newcomers get wrong.
- Sellers arrive from around six in the morning to set up.
- Dealers and collectors arrive at the same time, and go car to car as boots are opened, often before anything is unpacked. They are looking for antiques, records, jewellery, tools and anything mispriced.
- The public are admitted later, by which point the genuinely valuable material has usually gone.
The dealers’ habit of intercepting sellers in the queue is a permanent low-level irritation, and some sales explicitly ban it. Casual sellers are frequently astonished to find their box of records bought in its entirety, for cash, before they have got out of the car.
What is actually for sale
Children’s clothes and toys, DVDs, books, kitchen equipment, garden tools, bric-a-brac, and an inexhaustible supply of things bought for a hobby that lasted three weeks. Also, invariably: a bread maker, a fondue set, and several bags of golf clubs.
Alongside the private sellers there are usually semi-professional traders with new goods — phone cases, batteries, socks, plants — and at least one van selling bacon rolls and tea, which is a substantial part of the experience.
The haggling
Expected and unembarrassing, which is unusual for Britain. Prices are opening positions, offering less is normal, and the standard technique is to hold the item, ask “what’s your best on this?”, and wait. Late in the morning sellers become dramatically more flexible, because the alternative is loading it all back into the car.
Bring cash in small notes and coins. Card payment is spreading but far from universal, and a seller with a fiver in change cannot break a fifty.
Where it sits
Car boot sales occupy a specific place in the British second-hand economy alongside charity shops, jumble sales and, latterly, online marketplaces. Numbers have declined as eBay, Vinted and Facebook Marketplace have taken much of the trade — selling from home is easier than standing in a field at seven on a Sunday.
What keeps them going is that they are an outing as much as a transaction, and that there is no online equivalent of turning over a box of junk in a field and finding something extraordinary in it.