Some comments from an insider:
Vendors arrive on Saturday during the day. They bring a lot of presold items and (surprise surprise) corals like to be in water, so they put the items on the back of the rack, or even on the bottom of the tank. If you asked and things were already sold, that was most likely the problem. I know for a fact that I asked a certain vendor for prices on several items in that general vicinity before anyone could have possibly snatched them up and that was the reason they were not for sale. Were these the best items in the room? Why do you think people preorder them.
It was hot, we know. At around 11:30 we adjusted the airflow in the room and it got considerably cooler after that.
If you arrived and walked right in, sorry I will have to scold my wife, mother in law, 2 baby boys, Randy's son Zander, and a couple of other volunteers. We set up the gate so people will be forced to check in at the front desk but some people just walk right in late in the day like they have been there all day and we don't stop them. We do actually trust the membership not to take advantage of this, it is not intended. If you feel like it was a waste because you walked right in, I think you don't understand why there is admission to begin with, we have expenses and you're paying to get in to a special event. If no one checked your ticket at a movie theater, and you watched a movie, did you not get your value from the price of admission?
Variety. Hmmm. Taking into account that one vendor shut down their display after losing the majority of their livestock in a disaster (and indeed their livestock did not match what anyone else had in the room), I think there was more variety of frags than ever before. I personally would have liked to have seen more colonies but that is a request for the vendors themselves. Vendors bring what they think they can sell and sometimes they bring what sold quickly at the last swap. Personally, I find it amusing that people complain about lack of variety, blame whatever God you believe in! How dare he/she/it not create more and more varieties of corals for us to collect!
One other point about that. It was probably only 3-4 years ago that there were only 2 acan frags in the entire room. People ooh'ed and ahhh'ed over them all day. Then vendors brought only acans for 2 years and no acros. This past swap had a really balanced selection of different types of corals. A lot of vendors don't bring ORA anymore because everyone else has them. How many red planets do they need to bring? There were actually a lot of ORA corals that were not marked as such (due to being grown by a farmer and not ORA), and if you knew what you were looking for you could find them. There were actually 2 pieces of NEW ORA in the room, including one piece that has yet to be named. One vendor also had 2 pieces of a species that was just selected to be an ORA coral but if you didn't ask what it was you wouldn't have known that.
Cost. We've struggled to keep the price of the event low for a while. The price of admission has stayed the same for several years now. Increasing the price to $50 would be a form of price discrimination in my opinion and if we can't keep the price reasonable for the event we have failed as organizers.
We've been looking for a new venue for a long time. Pratt is easy to work with, cheap, has a good location, and we have access to Randy's tanks which is a HUGE plus for an aquarium society. I can tell you that we have looked at other locations and the prices are prohibitively high. Essentially we would have to pay for 2 days (since we set up on Saturday), the price on places with a modest increase in space would be an additional $8-12k, no aquariums onsite, no experience working with the site, and many other unknowns. I think we are beyond the point when we can reasonably use Pratt for these sized events and promise to continue the search for a new venue.
Some other quick notes:
- Very interesting to see comments from people complaining about people breathing down their necks while they were looking at tanks and other comments from people complaining about taking too long to look at tanks.
- In a larger space, it does not directly correlate to larger tanks. Vendors bring the same sized setups and if you had to wait to see what one vendor had for sale you would probably have to do it in a larger space as well. At MACNA there is usually a line to see several vendors.
- Too bad for people who only stayed for an hour. If you only wanted to buy coral you sort of missed the point of the event. There were a lot of other things going on throughout the day.
- Food is always a nightmare, and while this swap it was disorganized, there was indeed enough food for everyone.
