A Day Volunteering at the Lappeenranta Flea Market
Savitaipale, March 9th, 2018.
Even though I’ve only been away from Savitaipale for a week, my return has been full of surprises. First of all, because I hadn’t told my fellow volunteers that I was coming back. You can’t imagine their faces when they saw me… I absolutely love doing things like this!
Another big surprise is that the WorkAway family in Savitaipale has grown, and we are now no fewer than seven volunteers living and working together.
New WorkAway volunteers in Savitaipale
While I was away, a couple from Italy joined the team. For now, they’re the first volunteers to arrive together, since everyone else came on their own. The experience must be quite different when you travel as a couple, because you already know you’ll have someone by your side from day one. When you arrive alone, there’s always a bit of uncertainty about whether you’ll really connect with the rest of the group.
Yesterday, a guy from Québec (Canada) also arrived, and funnily enough, the exact same thing happened to him as when I first got here. I was calmly sorting clothes with one of the flea market assistants when suddenly a guy walked through the shop door and asked:
“Hello, is this Sofia’s place?”
I was completely stunned. It was exactly the same situation and the exact same question I had asked a few weeks earlier. He was carrying a huge backpack and explained that he was also coming to do a WorkAway in Finland.
It’s hard to believe how quickly the group has grown. The very day I left on my trip, another volunteer also left, although unlike me, he was heading back home. We went from being just four people to seven in no time. We’re now at full capacity, with no room for anyone else.
At the moment, we’re a wonderfully international mix of nationalities: Canada, Spain, Italy, Indonesia, Poland and Yemen.
The three business channels of the flea market
Today was especially busy because, for the first time, I helped out at the flea market in Lappeenranta. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before, but the owners sell their second-hand items through three different sales channels:
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The physical shop in Savitaipale.
This is where we usually work and where I help organise, clean, and sort the products. The shop is separated from our WorkAway host’s house (and our workplace) by just one door. It’s truly the heart of the business. During winter, there aren’t many customers, but in summer, when the weather improves, many more buyers come by. -
The online shop.
Besides selling items in the physical store, the products are also listed online and promoted on Facebook. For this reason, there’s a team of volunteers dedicated to taking photos so everything looks attractive and well-presented. -
The Lappeenranta flea market store.
This isn’t a shop in the traditional sense, but a dedicated area inside a large department store. Different sellers rent their own sections to sell second-hand goods. This is where a fellow volunteer and I spent the day today, and I’ll explain more below.
Working at the flea market in Lappeenranta
This flea market is located slightly outside the city, in what looks like an industrial area of Lappeenranta. Inside, there are around 300 different sellers, each with their own stand.
Every item is labelled with a reference number. This system allows the shop to track sales for each seller at checkout and helps owners identify which products belong to them. Otherwise, it would be absolute chaos. Imagine a customer picking up an item and leaving it somewhere else… it would be impossible to know who owns what.
What was our job there?
About four or five times a year, all the products on the stands are completely reorganized. This keeps the flea market from feeling repetitive and gives customers the impression that the items are new. If everything stays in the same place, regular shoppers quickly lose interest. By changing the layout, the chances of people stopping and buying increase significantly. Simple but effective marketing strategies!
Our main task was to move items from one shelf to another in the most varied way possible. We also cleaned the shelves, checked reference numbers, and added “half-price” stickers to selected products. At first, it felt a bit awkward because customers were walking around and watching us work, but after a while, you completely forget about it.
We spent several hours at the flea market. We arrived around noon and returned to Savitaipale at about 5:30 PM. It may not sound like much, but we were far more exhausted than on days when we work locally in the village.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to explore Lappeenranta this time. However, I visited the city recently, so I’ll leave a link here in case you’d like to read more about Finland’s eleventh-largest city.
In search of better Wi-Fi
This is slightly off-topic, but before starting work, we went looking for routers. The Wi-Fi signal in our apartment doesn’t reach very well unless you’re in the living room, and even then, only if you’re lucky. We checked Prisma, but they didn’t have anything at a reasonable price, so we’ll leave that mission for another day.
