Weekend trade
Vinyl, cassettes and the slow trade of a weekend stall
The stall goes up the same way every Saturday. Two folding tables, a stack of plastic crates, a hand-written card taped to the front that says what is inside: jazz, soul, a little kwaito, some gospel. The seller, who has been doing this for years, sorts by mood rather than genre. If you ask for something specific, he will point you to a crate and then leave you alone with it. That is the whole method.
Most of the stock comes from house clearances, estate sales and the occasional box left on a pavement with a note. Nothing is graded in the way a collector's catalogue would grade it. Sleeves are worn, corners are soft, and a few records carry a name written in ballpoint on the label. Prices sit on small stickers, often in a handwriting that changes from week to week. A rare pressing does not get announced. It gets played, quietly, while the seller keeps sorting.
What keeps the stall alive is not the records alone. It is the regulars who arrive without a plan, flip through a crate for twenty minutes, and then stay to talk about a pressing they heard once on the radio. A stranger recommends a local jazz record. Someone else asks, again, for something that never turns up. The seller plays one side while he works, and the conversation drifts with it. You leave with a single record and the sense that the morning was the point.
If you know a weekend seller worth visiting, or you have a memory of a stall that used to set up on your street, we read everything that comes in. What helps most is a name, the part of the city, and one concrete detail: the kind of stock on the table, the handwritten price stickers, the record the vendor keeps playing while sorting. Tell us what you saw rather than what you think we should write.
Pitches about a specific stall, a collector, or the slow Saturday trade around vinyl and cassettes are welcome. We edit for plain English before anything goes up, so write it the way you would say it out loud.
Use the contact page to send a pitch or a short note. The same address works if you would rather write by email.
The record stalls piece sits in a loose run of stories about small, stubborn city economies. These are the ones readers tend to move on to next, and the ones that share the same habit of standing still long enough to watch how something actually works.
Market day
Traders arrive before light, prices drift through the morning, and a mid-morning outage stops the card machines. A single Saturday, followed from first crate to last pack-up.
Read the market pieceEating out
Where to stand, what the stalls sell, how a queue reads, and where to sit once the food is in your hands. Plain and useful, not nostalgic.
Read the street food guideBack to the index
Short first-person pieces on the ordinary parts of city life, plus the walking-route column and reader mail. Two to three posts a week, no sponsored filler.
Browse all postsIf you know a stall, a seller or a corner worth writing down, send it through the contact page.
A few frames from the morning I spent standing at a weekend stall, mostly watching hands. Sleeves come out of the crate in no particular order, price stickers are written in ballpoint, and the vendor keeps one record playing while he sorts the rest. Nothing here is staged, and none of it belongs to us.
The stall packs up by early afternoon. What stays behind is a short list of records people asked for and did not find, and a handful of names the vendor now recognises by face.
About this piece
WSF Media is an independent, reader-supported blog about everyday city life in South Africa. Contributors write from Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, and every piece is edited for plain English before it goes up.
The idea started with a Saturday morning spent flipping through crates at a weekend stall, where the vendor sorted records by mood rather than genre and priced them with a marker on the sleeve. What kept the visit interesting was not the stock itself but the small exchanges around it: a stranger passing over a local jazz pressing, a regular asking for something that never turns up, one side playing while the sorting carried on.
The final piece stays close to those objects and people. It follows three sellers in different parts of the city and asks how they source stock, how they price it, and what happens when a rare pressing appears. It also notes the social side of the trade, where regulars come as much for the conversation as for the records.
The blog publishes two to three pieces a week, with no sponsored fluff and no listicles written only for search engines. If you have a story about your street, your commute or a spot nobody else writes about, you can send it through the contact page.
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