Paula King packs up some of her clothing items as she prepares to leave the MegaMarket.
If you never made the trip out to the old Powermatic building to take in McMinnville MegaMarket and its giant flea market, next weekend is your last chance. After one year and two months, the MegaMarket is calling it quits. There are a number of reasons but the main one is the building was costing more in utility bills than it was bringing in from vendor fees. ‘The electric bills are absolutely outrageous,’ said MegaMarket manager Wally Stern. ‘We couldn’t charge enough in booth fees to pay it. And the foot traffic was never what we hoped it would be. We figured with the gas prices the way they are, not a lot of people would be coming from out of town so it wasn’t going to get any better.’ I thought turning the facility into a large-scale flea market was a great use of an old factory building that had been empty for years. The concept generated pretty solid support as Wally said the MegaMarket had 116 vendors on its best weekend. While that might seem like a decent number, Wally said he hoped for better. ‘With a building this size, we could have fit 300 in here,’ he said. Some of the merchandise may have been a little too upscale, according to Wally. ‘We had some nice things in here, things I wouldn’t necessarily think of as flea market stuff so maybe that hurt us a little bit,’ he said. I walked around the MegaMarket on Friday and found most of the vendors were upset at having to leave. The customers didn’t seem too happy either. ‘It’s something else in Warren County that’s closing,’ said Kenneth King, who was packing up his booth with his wife, Paula. ‘We wanted to stay here at least through the summer,’ added Paula, who said their booth had been there for four months. As for the building itself, it was purchased by the Gordon McGee family. A tremendous amount of work has been done to upgrade the facility. That includes significant roof and plumbing work, and a whole lot of general clean-up work. Anyone interested in the building can contact the McGee family at 473-7777.
