Is This Trip Necessary?

My buddy and I were road-tripping from Vegas back to San Francisco and his car broke down in the California desert near a rathole dilapidated truck stop outside a town called “Yermo”. The mechanic there allegedly fixed it but didn’t, and we got the car to the next sizable town, Victorville, before it crapped out again. We crashed at a motel. First thing the next morning, he had a mechanic look at the car. The mechanic in Victorville told him that it needed a new alternator. My friend called the dealership in the area, and they had one in stock and were open. We told the mechanic where it was and that he could go over and get it right away. The mechanic hemmed and hawed about getting it. He finally admitted that he wanted to buy the alternator at Pep Boys, which opened three hours later, so he could mark it up to sell to my friend at profit, which he could not do with the dealership part since we knew the price. Understanding what was causing the problem, we asked what his profit would be on the mark-up. He said about $20. My friend told him to charge $20 as a service fee to go to the dealer and pick up the part immediately. The mechanic said he never thought of it that way, and all was copacetic. He got his profit, and we got back on the road hours ahead of what would have been the case otherwise.

The lesson of my desert adventure is that often it is non-transactional incentives driving one person’s behavior toward a seemingly suboptimal outcome for both parties. If you can divine the unspoken reasons behind your counter-party’s actions, get into that person’s head, it is golden when it comes to understanding what it will take to get things done, and why sometimes the clear winning answer isn’t the answer at all.

There’s a great book called “Freakonomics” by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt that is based on this concept. The most important thing they teach is learning to look at things from an atypical perspective because it explains so much of the reasoning behind seemingly irrational or inexplicable outcomes. I boil it down to always thinking about the incentives at work beyond the specific subject matter itself. Ask who is benefiting. Ask whether there are structures that are intended to guide your decision-making in a specific way. Ask who is bellowing the ‘facts’ at you. This card is better than that card? Who says it is and why? Does the counter-party in a transaction have a hidden agenda?

I see this professionally all the time. I had one client refuse to settle a nuisance injury lawsuit for $5,000. He spent over $40,000 fighting and ultimately getting the nuisance case dismissed. The other attorney could not understand why he wouldn’t pay a small extortionate settlement; he did not understand my client’s thought process. My client wanted to deliver a message to the plaintiffs’ bar not to come looking to his business for an easy payday ever again.

Which brings me to the card topic of the day: last year I decided not to go to Atlantic City for the National. It was the first show since 2019 that I could have attended due to COVID and personal issues, yet I passed, because the first (and last) time I went there for a show it sucked.

In pondering the decision whether to go or not to go, I ruminated on why we have the National in some really inconvenient, inhospitable places. Every year when the NSCC board announces future venues and Atlantic City and Cleveland are on the list, there is a great whine from the Collector Nation. Personally, I like Cleveland. It isn’t easy to get there for me, I usually must change flights in Chicago, and the venue is a charmless former tank factory in the middle of nowhere with zero amenities and bad food, but the city itself has a small, modern airport right next to the convention hotels and some decent dining if you know where to go. The ballpark is nice and relatively inexpensive compared to New York or Los Angeles, and there is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (which I have yet to get to, but it’s there). But AC? Ugh. Nothing makes collectors complain like scheduling the show in Atlantic City. AC is really hard to get to from most parts of the country (best I can do is fly into Philly and spend 1-2 hours on the road) and is, objectively speaking, a terrible location once you finally get there, basically a bleak, dangerous ghetto surrounding low-end casinos, with bad nightlife (a lot of the hotels close their bars at 10:00 because of the influx of hookers and drug dealers otherwise), and a skeevy beach. The food is lousy. Even the WIFI at the convention center doesn’t work right and they never fix it despite all the complaints every show. It is a substandard experience all the way around and as a result a good number of veteran dealers and collectors stay home. I am one of them.

So why do the powers that be hold the premiere show of the hobby in a place like that? For that matter, why is the show never held west of Chicago? And since Chicago seems to be OK with the NSCC leaders, why not just keep the show at Rosemont every year? After all, it is one of the great cities and transportation hubs of the nation, with tons of direct flights from all over, and the hotels and facility and abundant eateries are all walking distance. Comicon is in San Diego every year and it is a thriving event. Why do places like AC and Cleveland stay in the rotation?

If you ask the NSCC board why they go where they go, there is a plethora of justifications, from venue size to booking requirements. All of it is bullshit. Viewed as a ‘Freak’, the real answer is a set of administrative and financial incentives entirely unrelated to the experience of the convention attendees. For the organizers, AC and Cleveland are easy, low risk, and very profitable. The venues are dirt-cheap and are so desperate for traffic that they will take reservations years in advance. The hotel room guarantees are low. The unions do not charge as much for infrastructure set-up as at better venues, meaning that the tables can be offered at the same price as in Chicago with lower costs for the promoters, aka more profits. Most importantly, the National is a monopoly, and offers a great lesson in why monopolies are bad business. The NSCC ownership’s incentives are contrary to the wishes of a big chunk of its customer base, but as a monopoly, they know enough collectors and dealers will show up regardless of where the show is held to make their money, so why try harder? Call them the anti-Avis: they try less.

If you understand the incentives that drive the NSCC board you won’t ever post a bitchy screed on why the hell the National is in Atlantic City again; you will already know the real answer: money, sonny.

See you in Chicago this summer.