I live almost four hours from our convention site, and used to make it a one day event. I would leave early Saturday morning, take in some demos then do my buying Saturday afternoon. Then take part in some of the after hours events and go home late that night. That way I didn’t have to take any time off work. Dealers packing up early ended that for me. Now I have to take time off to go to convention or I just can’t go. In my case it is definitely the dealers fault that they lost late sales.

" IN NEWT'S WORLD"
No one else say it. But I will.


With these low fur prices. Dealers have a hard time making up expences. Profet is almost non exantent.
Today dealers show up ,mainly to build a costmer bace.
If you dont show your face, you are soon forgot about.

Thanks, Newt for bringing up the dealer's side of the story.

If a major dealer is not making profit, or very little? And is really only there for marketing & promotion? Then there’s no reason for them to pack up and leave early. Doesn’t matter if they have a “long drive” home or not. It’s a business that they chose to run. Run it like one!

Understood 100%. Like someone else posted, I think the days of Sterling, MTP, FnT and Scmitt having the huge booths are not long for the world. Have a much smaller setup with some gear for folks to handle and any new items, but offer free shipping on orders placed at the convention (many are already doing this) and make it more about showing that they are still alive and kicking and interact with people.

Have to sell a lot of lure and swivels to cover the costs of 3 vehicles going cross country pulling trailers, 8 workers, lodging and food for a 3 day convention......

Also there is a lot of dealer to dealer trading going on. We dont like to pay for shipping eather.

Figured that out my first convention. Helped move a bunch of gear for one of the bigger dealers to another one of the bigger dealers. When I asked what was going on, I got a little background on the biz.

Along with dealing a lot of times with high temperatures, humidity and or stormy weather. Tough on bodies and vehicles, lot of these bodies aren't young and spry anymore.

I'm not sure that's true. I go to convention mostly to visit with old friends. YES I buy my supplies as well, but as Pete said above, it would be cheaper to just order them online even with shipping. We can justify taking a "vacation" which involves us driving usually 10+ hours to visit with trapping friends Wed-Sun. There's no way in heck we could justify doing that for just a 1 or 2 day show.