Sunday, June 12, 2011

Card Show Recap

I set up a table at the Legends Sports and Games card show yesterday. The show was held inside of a shopping mall. The weather was cold and soupy in the morning. Perfect for a card show.
I has one 8' table to display my stuff on. I was stuck on a wing of the hallway, at the end near a door. Initially, I was kind of bent, because I thought I would miss some traffic. Maybe I did, but it wasn't much traffic. The "crowd" was small. The dealer across from me packed up 2 or 3 hours early. A couple of other dealers commented to me that the foot traffic was way down from the normal. Part of the cause for the poor turnout may have been the Legends website itself.
As you can see, there is no mention of a sports card show. There is a big big announcement for the Pack Wars that took place last evening. If you click on the button for the calender, and search June... no mention of a show. The organizer, Eric (a nice guy), took over the show prep as the prior guy that was in charge is "no longer with the company." Eric told me that there were radio ads on the local sports talk channel announcing the show. I listen to a fair amount of sports talk radio. I never heard one. Maybe the change-over from one organizer to another hampered them getting out the word. I don't know. Whatever the problem was, the result was low customer turn-out. To make matters worse, Greg Jones, the former All-American linebacker from Michigan State was scheduled to be there for an autograph session. He couldn't make it.

OK. Enough moaning about the lack of shoppers.
I donned my Kaline jersey and was ready for a big day. The show was scheduled to run from 9am till 5pm. Although one thing I saw somewhere said 10am. Either way, I was ready early. My Dad met me at 8am. We had the table ready by 9. Good thing we were early. There were guys perusing my stuff as early as 8:30.
My team of helpers. Dad, Codi, and Grant.
A couple of fellow bloggers made there way to my table. A couple of Greg's. Nearly Mint and Wolverine Musings. Thanks for swinging by fellas. I met a bunch of other nice people. A couple of boys looking for Larry Fitzgerald cards, a dude with a Costanza wallet raided my dime box to the tune of $9 bucks, and a guy that bought every Kaline and Verlander that I had. If not for that big spender, I would have just broke even.  Remember the sick guy from Target that I wrote about a while back? He was there. Fortunately, he didn't bring his diseased self over to my table.

 Thanks to that whale, I was able to head over to another guy's table and snag a bunch of 2011 Heritage that I needed.
All in all, I had a good day. I would have liked to sell more of my auto's and higher value cards. The stuff that was marked at a buck or less flew off the tables. I didn't make a killing, but a day hanging at a card show beats real work.

4 comments:

  1. Nice display. Hope your next show is even more successful.

    ReplyDelete
  2. dude, was that an easel?

    out of the box.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Always wonder what it's like on "the other side" of the table. I talk to some dealers about that a lot, and get some sense of it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I always say (and hear from dealers) that the best way to make money at a card show is with dime, quarter, 50c, $1 boxes. The high end stuff doesn't move that fast. I was at a local card show yesterday, spent about $30, and other than a single $5 card everything I bought was $1 or less.

    ReplyDelete