Starting Up a Pik'n'Mix At a Car Boot Sale ... Thoughts, Suggestions ?

Adereterial

mervyn11 wrote: »

You will NOT be able to sell the sweets in cups without weighing them out and declaring the weight.
You cannot sell things like that on a 'cupfull' basis...its against the law.
You will have to have a set of scales and weight the sweets.
The cost of the cups will be an awful lot more than some nice crisp paper bags.

Why not? Woolworths did for years.

Browntoa

they weighed the cups with the sweets in

whitty999

There is so many stalls of pick n mix in my local area bootfairs so check out your area bootfairs first
good luck with all

savemoney

You havent factored in costs for transport and car boot stall costs

Also this is really just Spring to perhaps mid Autumn work very few if any in my area have any car boots run after then

hunnie

Well done you for turning your disappointing A level results into something positive!

I would have thought you could weigh the cups and still charge £1. You could just make sure they have a minimum weight in there.

You could sell other wrapped sweets separately to those who prefer not to buy loose ones at a boot fair.

Best of Luck!!

Hunnie

paulwf

Before you shell out £300 for stock and materials why not buy a small quantity of sweets (wherever they are cheap, perhaps Poundland or Lidl?) and do a trial? With any luck you will break even or only lose a small amount, much better than being stuck with £250 of sweets!

If you want to make this a full time weekend job then you are looking to clear £150 net profit (remember no holiday and sick pay when self employed). Your gross profit is therefore in the region of £200 per weekend. Now do some maths...if you make 50p a cup profit you need to sell 400 a weekend, if £1 a cup then 200...basically you'll need to sell a high number, work out if this is viable.

I'm not sure but I think sweets are VAT rated (food and VAT can be complex, pls check). Remember nearly all wholesalers quote ex VAT prices, but as you won't be VAT registered you will have to pay the VAT.

As Savemoney said, if this is seasonal what are you going to do come mid-September?

blue_monkey_2

This week they had Pick & Mix stalls in the town centre, one was 99p for 100g, walk around the corner and the other was £1.20 for 100g. Whilst we was sat there the £1.20 stall did not have a single look or buyer, it is too expensive, I'd certainly not give my kids £1.50 for sweets.

How about pocket money sweets, if you can get membership for Makro or Costco then you can get some boxes of sweets and then sel them like that so that kids can spend 50p.

It depends on how much money you want to make I suppose though. As a consumer though I never let my kids spend that much money on sweets, 50p-£1 tops but even that is not that often.

no.1swimmum

Could you also have some made up bags with say 100g mixed sweets sealed so that those in a hurry could just grab and go so to speak - sweetie lady at my sons swimming club started doing this and now finds that she sells more like this than the kids choosing individual sweets and she makes them up at home etc so on the day it is less work for her

badmumof1

we have been doing this every weekend ( apart from the rain) for 7 years and love every minute of it.
We sell roughly 100g for 50p or sell on RRP but have noticed alot of the famous sweets like black jacks, fruit salads, milk teeth made by Barrett are slowly disapearing due to Barrett wanting more money wholesale.
If you state you are selling by weight you must label this and it has to be true.
We have never been pulled by weights and measures because we dont state this on our boards.
People buy from us because they want to and they continue to do so week in week out.
We do get the odd person that says you dont get much for 50p but then i think what can you get for 50p these days.
We have a range of 80 different varieties of sweet and also make up kids mix up bags.
All our sweets are the best quality brands such as haribo, swizzles matlow, Chewits ( malaco), Vidal, Tilleys to name but a few.

Good luck on your adventure. If i can be of any help just message me.

chalkie99

badmumof1 We sell roughly 100g for 50p

This is the main problem because the OP says in his first post:

Gti_Sikh wrote: »

i dont see why i cant retail for 1.25 - 1.50 per 50g cup.

which is 5 to 6 times more expensive per gram.

Can't see that working anywhere let alone at a car boot, which is not to condemn the idea of having a go at something but I don't think the sums are realistic.