Sunday, May 20th, 2012

If you woke up today craving a street fair, you’re in luck (you’re also in luck if you were craving Mamapalooza 2012).

The Amsterdam Avenue Festival runs from 12:00 – 5:00 pm today.

The action stretches from 77th to 90th Streets (on Amsterdam), and will include the typical street fair fixtures, including music, food, and a smorgasbord of vendors selling a variety of useful and useless items.

Speaking of vendors, a quick note on the subject of buying things at street fairs…

I got a note from MUW reader Jon following one of the UWS street fairs on May 6th. Seems he had an incident with buying bed sheets from one of the vendors. Per Jon:

I got ripped off today at the Broadway street fair. I fell for a scam that you might want to alert your readers (and everybody else) about.

I bought a box of bed sheets, sold as 100% cotton, for $25 cash (see the label from the outside of the sealed box below). When I got home, I discovered from the inside fabric label that the sheets are not cotton at all, but 100% microfiber.

I happened to have gotten the vendor’s business card, so I called him. He was very defensive and rude, telling me that “if I knew how to read,” I would have known that the sheets aren’t cotton. He pointed out the fine print above the 100% EGYPTIAN COTTON headline that says, essentially, “as soft as…” (although the English is questionable).

These polyester sheets are packaged by a Monsey, N.Y. company called Sanders Collection, and they’re also misleadingly sold on Amazon.com, but I’m sure that there’s good reason to be suspicious of all the linens — and probably a lot of the other merchandise — being sold at these street fairs.

Your mileage may vary, and it’s up to you to decide if this is really a “scam” or just a case of “you get what you pay for.”

Either way, always be diligent with your street fair purchases. Unlike when you buy from a store with a defined return policy, most street fair purchases are “no backsies.”

My own street fair shopping experience is limited to a pack of tube socks I bought about eight years ago. I think they cost $5 and, knock on wood, they’re still going strong.

UPDATE: Heard back from Jon after this post went up and he sent in the following:

As a postscript that you might want to add, while the vendor was anything but sympathetic to my complaint, the production company that ran the street fair was extremely sympathetic and actually (and surprisingly) refunded my money and assured me that this vendor will no longer be welcome at their events.

Filed under: Events, Food & Drink, Free, Kid Stuff, Manhattan, Music, New York City, NYC, Seniors, Shopping, Street Fair, Things to do, Upper West Side, Upper West Side Blog, UWS No Comments »
Tags: Amsterdam Avenue Festival, New York City, NYC, Street Fair, street fair scam, Upper West Side, UWS