The Last Thing...
Editorial
by Dave Watkins
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Attending various Wargame, Military & Modelling shows and fairs over the last 15 years or so both as a punter and as a Trader, I have been more and more puzzled as to how the various show orga-nisers can get away with charging extortionate prices for trade stands and increasingly in recent years have the gall to charge absurdly high door fees to the public. How do justify charging a man £ 10.00 so that he can drag his long suffering spouse and usually enthusiastic children around a show? There is only one paying customer in our group of four and the poor sucker has been stung for a tenner!
The traders, having to pay anything between £ 30 and £ 200 pounds for his 6 foot of table, now needs to sell hard and well to the thousands of spending customers that come through the door. If he has had to travel some distance and/or spend at least one night in some form of accommodation his costs have already rocketed - for the sake of argument lets say he pays £ 200 for a 12 foot stand at a two day show, £ 80.00 for accommodation for two people and around £ 50.00 for travelling expenses.
Our hypothetical trader is now £ 330 pounds out of pocket - we'll ignore the time spent on packing for the show, the cost of his display fittings and food and drink. Assuming that our trader is selling 15mm figures for 15 pence each, (I have chosen a middling price as they cost variously between 10 and 22p each), he manufactures his own figures and they cost him say 8 pence each to produce, our trader now has to sell to break even, 4,714.285 figures!
Now you may think that this is a near worst case scenario, it may be, but I don't believe it to be the case. To sell 4,000+ plus figures you need one hell of a lot of paying customers.
We try lots of different things here at First Empire and in January 1994, I decided we would experiment with the First Empire Show. Mainly to prove that in certain quarters traders and cus-tomers are being ripped off.
The First Empire Show, grew beyond my initial expectations, we charged £ 10.00 per 6 foot stand so that we could recover costs, and at the insistence of the venue owners, (so that we could retain control over who had access), we charged £ 1.00 admission for adults, 50p for under 16s and of course the now famous phrase "wives, girlfriends and accompanied children were allowed in free". Unlike some shows, and I cannot believe that this takes place, we did not charge admission to demonstration gamers and reenactors, nor did we charge reenactors for table space!
At the end of the day, First Empire made a tidy profit, a second show will take place same time next year as nearly all traders expressed a desire to attend again, and we had at least 500 people through the door, a higher estimate of 650 was given by my stand assistants, Ian & Rob - many thanks guys!, but I will settle for the lower figure.
All in all not bad for a show in a remote town in the middle of Shropshire was it? And a vast improvement on the 120+ wanderers and a dyslexic parrot that turn up at some shows, whose doors I have vowed never again to cross!
The message of this diatribe, should now be clear, if you are charging high prices for trade stands, then you should get off your backsides - albeit that lifting your butt with the fat wad of cash that is in your back pocket may prove to be difficult - and start providing value for money. At the First Empire show we put 50 people through the door for each £ 1.00 charged for stand space. So if you are charging £ 100 for a 6 foot stand - shouldn't the traders have a right to expect 5,000 customers through the doors?
Before these poor innocents start bleating about the cost of hiring the venues, I am told that for another £ 80 I could have hired a certain venue in Reading and for another £ 100 the Telford Exhibition Centre (a smaller version of the NEC)!
And think about the punter, the man in the street, the customer. Let's get these door prices down now! I've heard the argument that the door prices reflect the quality of the displays and demonstration games. If that is your argument, then answer this one. HOW MUCH DO YOU PAY THE DEMONSTRATION GAMERS FOR BEING SO GOOD AS TO PUT ON A DEMONSTRATION GAME OR DISPLAY? (Deliberate Caps there so that you can read it slowly!) The revolution is coming so prepare for new shows and fares at new locations.
Finally, I must publicly thank, John & Chris of Connoisseur, who willingly allowed themselves - unwittingly turning up the night before - to be roped in to setting up. Richard Ayliffe, Brian Hall, Peter Gibbs, Colin Allen, Chris Renner and Lawrence Passet for similar services. My daughters Emma & Lucy who earned their money manning the door. The editorial concubine, Julie, for presenting the awards for best display game, trade stand and reenactor - which went respectively to Shrewsbury Wargames Club, Dave Thomas and Mike Freeman (no the last one wasn't fixed - Julie had never met him before!) - and to Chris Durkin of the 21ème Ligne (NA) whose troops attended in considerable numbers and performed guard duty in a most excellent fashion.
To close a blatant plug, First Empire reader Dave Paddock of the USA recently completed a tour in Germany. In his spare time he visited many historic battle sites and took numerous photographs and scale drawings of many buildings that featured in Napoleon's greatest battles. These are being turned into 15mm scale high quality models. They are being produced in resin and will be available in th U.K. from Wargames South for contact details - and can be viewed at the following UK shows, Derby, SELWG and Warfare (Reading). The Granary at Essling, a house with archway and a small village barn are available for purchase now. The next release already awaiting moulding is the Krippendorf Windmill of Auerstadt fame.
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