I attended the Show yesterday and got there about 11. It appeared to be lightly attended and was in a small room. I suppose there were about 20 dealers there.
When I first started attending this Show in 2005 it was in Schutzen Park and the size of the show and the number of dealers was roughly comparable to that of Valley Forge last year. However, over the years it has gotten considerably smaller, moving from Schutzen Park to a location near the Meadowlands to Edison (NJ Exposition Center) to now a dingy and dungy room in the Holiday Inn.
Yes, it's a sign of the times -- show attendance is falling (NJ used to have three or four shows besides Hackensack and now we are down to one) -- but management of this show could be improved. NJ has numerous collectors and we are a good location for people wanting to come from NY and Pennsylvania and in my opinion this show could be a lot better than it has become.
Hi, Brad! The same promoter ran a show in Langhorne, PA, for a number of years, and what you describe of this show, sounds like what gradually happened to that show, too. It went from a show with about 30 to 40 vendors, in a nice, business-class hotel, to a small, less nice venue with maybe eight individual vendors, in its last year. It was too bad, because it fell in a good time of the year, and it was local to folks here in SE PA and central and southern New Jersey.
He promotes the shows well enough, I suppose, if we talk about traditional advertising. He takes out ads in the magazines, and even more, he makes sure that he's got flyers out at other shows, including the wargaming shows. I suspect there are other factors at play in the decline of these shows.
He also stages the "Heart of the South" show in Annandale, VA. I haven't been to that one in a number of years, but I wonder if a similar trend is in progress there, too.
Did you find anything for your collection, at least?
Prost!
Brad
