Queues in Madrid to buy used furniture from a luxury hotel

Queues to buy used furniture from a luxury hotel

The ME Madrid Reina Victoria, on the Plaza de Santa Ana, is closing and selling off 10,000 pieces of its furniture. This is no neighbourhood flea market: 2,100 free tickets sold out in 20 minutes and 70,000 people expressed interest in the sale. Among the items on sale are mattresses, pillows and bed bases with years of use. The highest price in the catalogue is a distressed leather sofa at 875 euros; the lowest, plates at two euros. The scene has peine an uncomfortable debate about what it means to belong to the middle class in Spain today.

What's on sale and at what prices at the hotel flea market

The catalogue reads like a hotel inventory: Kettal terrace sun loungers at 70 euros, wooden tables at 25 and 50, beds with base and mattress at 135 and 150, lamps at 7.5, Nespresso coffee machines at 30, televisions at 70 and soap dispensers at 5. The event is run by Eco-One, a start-up hired by Meliá, which is distributing the goods over three days. By Friday, practically everything on display had sold out.

Eco-One co-founder Zdenka Lara defended the event as an environmental operation: "hotels are refurbished every six or seven years and this has a very significant environmental impact". In practice, the public entered in batches of 50 people with 45 minutes to shop in the lobby, and the most attractive pieces —an Eames-style lounge chair, for example— had already sold out before the doors peine.

Why people are buying second-hand mattresses and pillows

Price explains half the phenomenon. The other half is more uncomfortable. Some argue that buying a used mattress is a hygiene gamble; against that stands the argument that a new mattress at Ikea already costs 70 euros and that the middle class has been stretching every euro for years. One buyer summed up the calculation: "I saved 30 euros". Another pointed out that hotel furniture is good quality and that intensive use doesn't invalidate it.

The sight of bags full of plates, duvets and cushions, dragging office chairs towards the exit, doesn't fit the image of a comfortable middle class. María Delgado, one of the buyers, had spent 350 euros on beds, fountains and lamps to furnish her holiday home. There were also those who bought ten coffee machines or fifteen lamps, and in the queue there was suspicion that they would end up on resale platforms.

The debate over the middle class buying used furniture

The underlying discussion is not the flea market itself, but what it reveals. One camp holds that this is nothing more than opportunistic consumerism: Spaniards have always shopped at sales and flea markets, and doing so now doesn't make anyone poor. A bleaker reading suggests that Spain's comfortable middle class hasn't existed for years: those who call themselves that are, in the words of one participant, "dried up like salted tuna", and the posturing masks a real loss of purchasing power.

Between the two positions lies a striking fact: the interest in second-hand designer pieces. A Barcelona-style armchair that sells for 4,000 euros in France appeared here for 90. Some conclude that the Spanish buyer no longer aspires to the original, but to the cheap replica. That's not upper middle class: it's a middle class with aspirations and a tight budget.

What Eco-One says about repeating the event

The start-up plans to repeat the experience. Other hoteliers have already requested similar events, according to its co-founder, and the asset liquidation platform —until now aimed only at hotels— has found an unexpected goldmine in the general public. More furniture was sold on Saturday and Sunday, with new lots allocated to each day.

The phenomenon has an obvious economic reading: there is massive demand for second-hand furniture at bargain prices, and a growing supply of hotels being refurbished every few years. The market exists. What is less clear is whether the queue on the Plaza de Santa Ana portrays a middle class that saves, or a middle class that can no longer afford anything else. At these prices, the second life of a hotel mattress seems like a bargain. The question left hanging is: for whom.