Everything Is Money, Charlie

Sure, I will quote Gangsters…great bad movie, BTW.

I have a table at the Front Row card show in Pasadena this weekend. The show, as is the practice with most shows currently, has a four-hour trade night on Saturday. As the promoter describes it: "Entry is free for all attendees. Show off your cards, and make deals with other collectors."

Permit me to hate on trade night.

I love the idea of a trade night FOR KIDS. That is how it started, as a way to let KIDS have the fun of swapping cards that got all of us old farts jazzed on the Hobby. Since trade nights have been opened to adults, however, the trade night idea has morphed from a nice thing for the kids into a de facto free card show where anyone can set up and sell cards at no cost. I've been to two trade nights and both times it was predominantly a bunch of adults sitting at tables with their cards laid out taking offers for sale. It really ticked me off to see it after what I spent to set up inside the shows. In February, for example, I spent approximately two grand to go to Ontario for the last Burbank Card Show. Why am I paying to rent booths (and display cases), purchase supplies, file sales tax reports, pay fees for e-payments like Venmo, etc., and pay for travel, when I am effectively competing with everyone who wants to sell their cards at the trade night for free?

The only practical solution I see is to restrict attendance at trade nights to kids 14 and under. I’ve heard other suggestions, like restricting how much stuff an attendee can bring or prohibiting sales, but those won’t work. Content and transactional limits are not practical. Policing how much people bring in requires a level of security screening of baggage that would be incredibly intrusive and time-consuming; might as well bring in the TSA. Restricting transactions to trades requires even more intrusion--literally hovering over every deal and intervening to prevent sales, or forcibly removing the buyer and seller, and since most of the under-35 crowd deal in e-payments, there won't be cash changing hands to prove a sale took place unless you also plan to search attendees’ phones. Restricting attendance to 14 and under, that is readily and quickly policed at the door; the parents can go in with their kids. The grown men without kids who've had all day at the show to trade in the hallways and aisles can go home to their lonely basement apartments and leave the play time to the kids.

The main justification I hear for having a trade night is that it helps increase attendance. Let’s break that down, because I don’t think that is true or accurate. First of all, I think that attendance is a misleading metric. Headcount is far less relevant than demographics: who is attending the show, not how many. Sunday mornings at every show I’ve worked in SoCal in the last 18 months are flooded with the stroller people; typically a mother and father with really small kids who are there for an hour at most before going on to family activities. I can walk the line before admission, count the strollers, and predict my sales for the first hour or two of the show. If there are lots of strollers, I will be lucky to make $100 before noon: stroller people clog the aisles and just do not buy stuff. A forlorn dad gets to look at some cards he can’t afford and isn’t allowed to buy before the toddlers melt down and his boss-momma insists they leave for the park.

Attendance at a show is not driven by trade nights; the reverse is true. Trade night is a feature of the show. Attendees at the trade night have to buy a show ticket to get in to the trade night. They are already going to the show.

Most of all, if the promoter truly wants to drive attendance, make admission to the show free. When I promoted shows, my partners and I quickly agreed on free attendance to reduce the friction to zero and maximize the money spent with dealers. We upped the table fees by a few bucks per to make back the money on the assumption that the dealers won’t care about an extra $20 per table if they see free admissions. Frictionless admissions work. Charge the VIPs or Early Birds, by all means, but make the general admission free if driving attendance is a valued goal.

I’ve also heard adult trade night participation likened to bringing your own snacks to the ballpark. I get it; I bring a goodie bag to games to avoid paying for overpriced, crappy food. The analogy is inaccurate, though. Buying things to take into the game is not the same as setting up an alternative game. What is happening is more akin to a parasitic casino being built right next to a big Vegas resort property, and it does siphon off business. When I used to go to Vegas every fall for the plaintiffs' bar convention at The Venetian, I would go off-property to the Casino Royale next door to gamble. I liked the rooms, amenities, and dining at The Venetian, but I wanted cheaper gambling so I took my craps game to a different venue. I only budgeted a few hundred dollars to play with, but it wasn't being played at The Venetian.

The biggest issue for me is what an adult trade night does to walk-ins. I have noticed that shows with unrestricted trade nights have appreciably fewer walk-in offers of sale across my table than those shows without trade nights or where trade nights are reserved for kids. As a dealer, I have to look at this thing holistically. The retail trade I do across the table is only a part of what I pay for; I am also counting on the opportunity to buy at wholesale from attendees. I've made more money from a good buy at a show than I have from sales at that show. When the walk-ins can walk over to trade night instead and sell at retail to other collectors, either I don't get things offered to me or the offers are at retail with little wiggle room. I haven't bought anything substantive from a walk-in at any show since Anaheim in 2023, and now that I think about it, those purchases were on Sunday, after the trade night was over and the floating ‘dealers’ had to offer things to the vendors if they wanted to move them.

Again, I am not against trade nights for kids, I just don’t want to subsidize my competition with my table fees. So, when you come to the Front Row Card Show at the Pasadena Convention Center this weekend, feel free to skip the trade night on Saturday evening unless your kid is going with you

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