My Festivus Gripe About The National, Part I
“The tradition of Festivus begins with the airing of grievances. I got a lot of problems with you people and now you're gonna hear about it!”—Frank Costanza
The target of my grievance this year is the board of the NSCC, which runs the National, and I have so much to say that I am splitting the column into two parts.
A new management team was awarded the show for 2024, and given what they’ve done so far, they must have said to themselves “let’s see what’s not working and let’s see if we can make things worse”. The main issue the show faces, aptly summarized by the National organizers themselves, is that it has outgrown its model:
“The National has sold out of booth space for the last several years. The 2024 Cleveland National was completely sold out before we left Rosemont in July 2023.”
Sold out. As in, no new dealers. Now, a well-managed business would perceive the growth in interest for booths as an opportunity to expand the show and make more money, but the National has never been a well-managed business, so the promoters instead instituted a rule that will make things even worse: they decided to enforce the rule barring dealers from sharing space. The change sucks giant donkey balls and I give a big middle finger the board for making it while clinging to other outmoded dealer space allocation rules and procedures that exacerbate its negative impact.
The booth sharing ban is a classic case of “looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies,” as Groucho said. Sharing booths is a tradition as old as the card show itself. Barring it puts a good number of dealers who were stalwarts of the show between a rock and a hard place. They cannot get into the show through the front door because the show is sold out with a dealer waiting list a mile long and thanks to this rule change, now they cannot even set out a showcase or two of cards on a friend’s table. I know a lot of old school vintage sellers who used to do that every year, me included. We added depth to the offerings at the show and hurt no one, and are now on the sidewalk, and for what? Explain to me like a four-year-old how booth sharing per se hurts the show. When I work a show, I share a table whenever I can. Sitting a 3-4 day show alone is a Herculean effort. You need someone else to watch the store while you take a leak or stretch your legs. Attendees get the benefit of a more diverse selection of materials due to the presence of these extra dealers, many of whom are niche sellers (like me) who may not have a full table of stuff. The attendees should be the first and foremost concern of the show promoters. Besides, with the show sold out and a big waiting list, it isn’t like the promoters are losing money.
The critics will say that subletting booths allows high priority dealers to take more booths than they need and then sublet them at a profit. I disagree with the diagnosis and the purported harm. Regardless of who rents the booth, the sublessees are nevertheless dealers who bring more stuff for the show attendees. In other words, the show attendees get served either way. And if the tables can be sublet at a profit, that means there is a market imbalance and the solution is to raise prices or expand the show, not eliminate a practice that helps both dealers and attendees.
What the people who criticize subletting really are against is that they aren’t the ones subletting the space. That isn’t a problem with subletting booths, it is a problem with the booth allocation system itself. If the system allows booth hogs to cause a problem, stop them from being hogs by limiting the number of booths they can scarf up. Instead, the show promoters opted for a fix that doesn’t address the root problem and that is essentially unenforceable without applying a far heavier hand than anyone wants. How, exactly, are you going to prevent Joe Dealer from letting his tablemate of 20 years put his stuff in a case, without having to hassle every single booth-holder all week long? Are there going to be hall monitors continually checking who owns what at every booth? Hardly. Wrong remedy, misapplied.
The other people I feel sorry for (besides myself) are the local dealers who traditionally set up for the National when it swung into town but have been locked out for years. One of the charms of, and one of the reasons for, rotating the show was so that local dealers could get into the National and set up. I found some great stuff at every National I attended sold by the local dealers and weekend warriors who were allowed to set up. Much of my Jim Brown oddball and team issued items collection, for example, came from local dealers set up at the Cleveland shows. Now none of those dealers have a snowball’s chance in hell of setting up. That is a fail in my book, and it is entirely because the board has not changed its policies to match the reality of show sell-outs, not because it has to be that way.
While the promoters have gone on the offensive over booth-sharing, they left the root causes of the allocation problems in place: they are still trying to cram the entire show onto a contiguous floor and are still assigning table priority based on seniority. Each has outlived its utility and must go.
The plain fact is that the hobby has outgrown the 1980s contiguous floor model. I look to Comicon as a model for where the show should be. Comicon is spread across multiple halls and rooms in the San Diego Convention Center, and yet the show is fantastic. The organizers there understand that the various activities and events that do not involve buying and selling memorabilia do not need to be in the same space as the dealer tables. Rosemont and the IX Center both have tons of space beyond the single room footprint of the show, so it is about time that the NSCC board split the show into separate rooms.
I do not understand why the show cannot be expanded by using multiple non-contiguous convention halls. The hobby has so many facets now with very little overlap among them that limiting the show to what can fit onto one show floor unnecessarily limits the breadth of what can be offered to the attendees. We have dealers, auctioneers, corporate goods and services, grading, autographs, art displays, pack breaks, and now an area that appears to be set up solely for braying jackasses to do annoying live streams. The autographs, graders, breaks, and social media screeching areas are already in specific parts of the hall, and these are areas that shoppers avoid anyway. Those could be put into separate halls without anyone being short-changed. Put it into another hall and all that freed up space could be devoted to letting in more dealers. It would make the show better for card and memorabilia collectors by delivering more content and by not forcing them to walk through multiple dead zones with nothing of interest. It would also alleviate floor congestion and admission delays due to everyone trying to pour into the same space at the same time. It would also curtail noise. As someone who is hearing impaired, the background roar of a show with all the breaking and noisy activities makes it hard for me to engage in a conversation, even with my hearing aids at max.
Now, in a perfect world, I would also push all the corporate booths to another space, or at least to the back of the room, and I would put all of the auctioneers in one area. People who are interested in the corporate stuff will find it; the visitors who don’t care about corporate booths and would never visit them if it wasn’t for the occasional free candy bar or tote bag don’t go there anyway, so there is no need for the corporate area to bisect the main room. It is an impediment, not a marketing tool, to have it in the center, unless annoying people by making them go around it is the goal. It also causes problems for dealers who are unfortunate enough to be in the shadow of a looming corporate booth. My friends at Lutfa Cards had that problem last summer and were not happy with the lack of visibility and light in their booth. They deserved better. As for the auctioneers, sorry to my friends who run auction houses, but your booths at the National are about as useful to most attendees as tits on a bull: the vast majority of attendees just walk right by them. You need to get out of the way of the actual dealers and their customers. Perhaps set up special corporate-style booths for the auctioneers in the lobby since their main reasons for being at the show are publicity and walk-in consignments. Put an auctioneers area in the lobby and everyone will see it.
And then there is the table allocation system. Ugh. An antiquated disaster. This is how the NSCC explains the process:
“Dealers who have registered and exhibited at a National (under their own name and not as a secondary designate) receive a Priority Point for every National they have done. At the Lottery, the first group to select are those people who have exhibited at the most previous Nationals and therefore have the highest Priority. At the 2024 event in Cleveland, the highest Priority will be 44 and those dealers will be permitted to select booth space first. The selection process continues moving down in Priority until all Priorities have selected space or until all booth space has been selected. If space is still available, dealers with no previous Priority are permitted to select booths.”
In other words, the older you are, the longer you’ve been there and the more likely you are to get as many booths as you want. I understand that the system was adopted to reward loyalty and sell booths in an era when the show could not sell out the floor space. Well guess what? That rinky-dink eccentric hobby of 1980 has evolved into a complex multi-billion-dollar industry and the demand for dealers’ tables has expanded accordingly. Time to stop behaving like we are still putting on a show in a church rec room.
Since the show is a sell-out every year, the result of the current booth allocation system is a Congress-style gerontocracy where all the goodies are dependent on seniority and all the priority dealers will gobble up the resources at the expense of everyone else until they die off. Time to get rid of it. At the very least, there should be a hard limit on how many tables a dealer can buy. The show promoters can then spread the resulting extra tables down the wait list. While that will not end the waitlist, it will help, but the ultimate solution is to expand until everyone who wants in gets in.
If the show promoters won’t expand the show, then we need a table selection process that gives all interested parties a shot at getting a table. In other words, a table lottery. A purely random selection process would be way fairer to everyone and would create a show that is much more interesting to visit. Attendees would see new faces and different inventory every year, not just the same old stuff that the same old dealers put out last year. There are some dealers whose inventories are so stale that it is a running joke with collectors that we go visit “our” cards once a year, because we know they will be there every time. One dealer had an Exhibit card I wanted for a decade. I never bought it because it was grotesquely priced, and I could count on seeing it every time I went to the show. Well, I could count on it until he kicked the bucket.
Does my booth lottery suggestion mean that occasionally some hobby bigwig will be shut out of the National due to the lottery? You bet your sweet bippy it does. But what is more equitable, shutting out some of the people all of the time, or shutting out some of the people some of the time with everyone having the same risk of being shut out at any given time? I’d say the latter is the more utilitarian solution because it serves more people more of the time. We need to cultivate interest in the next generations of dealers, not shut them out until the old guard dies off. When a hobby ossifies, like philately (stamps), the collecting base dies off without a new one to replace it and the treasured objects becomes trash sold at flea markets.
The booth selection process as currently constituted also unfairly excludes the newer faces and voices in the hobby. Yeah, I said it: there is a bias against younger dealers, dealers of color, and women built into a seniority-based table allocation system. Now before you start writing me pissy emails about wokeness, don’t bother. I am not some wingnut talking up diversity-equity-inclusion on principle—as you know by now, I don’t have principles and I don’t give a squirt of piss about inclusion per se—so I do not encourage diversifying the National dealer base to satisfy some social ideology. I am talking it up because I see the benefits firsthand when I set up at local shows here in Cali. I’ve now done several large (as many as 800 tables) shows in SoCal in the last two years where dealer booths are not allocated based on seniority, and the youth and diversity of the dealers is astounding as compared to the National. Granted, I live in the most diverse area in the country and the dealer base tends to reflect that naturally, but I cannot believe that the collecting base of attendees at the National is better served by the current table allocation system than it would be if everyone had a realistic shot at setting up. Dealers who are not part of the old boys’ club bring a whole new energy to the hobby, along with a whole new clientele. They come into shows with varied areas of interest as compared to the traditional four-sport model that us old farts follow, and offer different items for sale, like lacrosse, soccer, F1, and non-sports cards. The expanded collector base they bring in ends up getting into vintage four-sport cards eventually, so it inures to everyone’s financial benefit. I can see it every show I deal at now. Collectors who are new to the vintage end of the hobby hit my table and go nuts over vintage stuff that is commonplace stuff to us old farts but that they find new and intriguing. The more young and new hobbyists we bring in, the better off it will be for us old guys with expensive collections that are going to need to be sold some day; gotta build the customer base.
Just get your shit together NSCC.
We now move to the feats of strength…
See you all in 2024,
Your Friendly Neighborhood Curmudgeon