Bazaar Suggests Markets From Afar
If you want to visit south of the border, you can buy a ticket from the Acapulco Travel Agency at the Indoor Swap Meet of Stanton.
Or, you can save yourself time and money by just taking a look around.
“The place looks like we’re in Mexico,” said Veronica Roman, who was born in Mexico and lives in Santa Ana. “There’s a mall like this in Zacatecas,” she said, so “this one makes me feel at home.”
In fact, there are malls -- or, as some call them, flea markets -- like this throughout much of the world, especially in Mexico and Central America, where discounted prices are passed on by vendors-without-walls who pay a pittance for their space.
That was the concept in 1988 when Ard Keuilian, who had developed several auto centers on Beach Boulevard, opened the two-story, 40,000-square-foot “international marketplace” on a 2 1/2 -acre lot near Beach Boulevard and Cerritos Avenue. “I had no idea what I was doing,” Keuilian later admitted. The indoor swap meet, he said, was something he “just had the feeling that the city needed.”
It wasn’t immediately clear, however, that the city agreed.
After an initial period of success, the swap meet -- which, unlike its more common parking-lot counterparts, offers vendors permanent slots -- hit hard times. “The novelty wore off,” Keuilian explained at the time. “Then the economy went bad, and we were just breaking even.”
He and his partners tried to recoup by pushing a ballot measure that would have allowed them to turn the swap meet into a card club by legalizing gambling in Stanton. Voters defeated it by a 4-1 ratio.
So they refocused their energies on the original concept. And two years ago, the business was bought by a new company called Stanton Marketplace LLC, which began making changes.
“We’re a little more selective about who comes in,” manager David Anderson said of the vendors, who now number 83 and pay $500 to $1,500 a month for spots. “I’d rather have an empty space,” he said, “than put in a junk business that will leave in two months.”
Among current offerings are name-brand cellphones, electronic equipment, jewelry, brightly colored clothing, lingerie, Jesus icons, plastic flowers, toys and foreign-language CDs -- generally priced, Anderson said, 10% to 25% lower than anywhere else. The swap meet also features a busy cyber cafe, nail salon and Mexican snack bar. And lacing its atmosphere is the smell of tacos mixed with the snippets of several languages.
“We embrace anyone from anywhere,” Anderson said of the customers, about 60% of whom are Latino. “We typically attract people familiar with this environment -- a lot are recent immigrants.”
That wasn’t particularly evident the week before Christmas, when the aisles were crowded with last-minute shoppers. “My friend told me he got sunglasses here for $3.50,” said Teresa Hoover, 17, of Buena Park, intensely engaged in her first swap meet visit. “That’s what brought me here,” she said, adding that she thought everything at the malls was overpriced.
Patricia Halorich, a retired government worker living in Stanton, said she’d been shopping at the indoor swap meet for more than a decade, mainly to patronize her favorite vendor, Jimmy the Jeweler. “He has good prices,” she said of Jimmy Phuong Dinh. “And he stands by his stuff. I know they pay high rent at the malls, but I don’t want to have to pay for it.”
And Agnes Golebiowska, 28, who moved to Anaheim four years ago from Poland, said she had stopped by on a whim to replace a broken watchband. “I saw it from the street,” she said. “I know about these kinds of places; we have them in Poland. I came here to find a good deal.”
She left with no complaints.
