Bacteria? Really?

Yeah, I remember that at the shows, a lot of the other vendors would just come by my tables, and many of them were evidently checking my prices, assuming they wanted to know how much to lower their prices to compete. So I got tired of that. I made it a point to put prices on the animals as the VERY LAST thing, right before the doors opened and the public came in. When they would blatantly ask me about prices during setup, I would just tell them I didn't know yet. I was pricing things by the seat of my pants, so come back later.

Personally, I never really checked anyone else's prices. I just priced them as to what I felt they were worth and would likely (hopefully) sell for. Of course, many times I was seriously wrong, and evidently felt the animals were worth more than what people wanted to pay. I remember one show when I hatched out a BUNCH of really REALLY gorgeous amelanistic Okeetee phase corns. I brought along every one of them that wasn't in shed, thinking they would sell like hotcakes at the show. How could they not? They were GORGEOUS! I priced that at $35 each, which I felt was very reasonable, based on how great they looked. Well, I didn't sell even one of them that weekend. Not a one! I even actually walked out in front of the tables to look at them to see if I was really missing something. Heck, they STILL looked gorgeous to me, but apparently not to anyone else. That really had me doubting myself in that I must not have ANY clue about what people find attractive. Never have been able to explain that one to myself.

I remember doing a show in Tampa where we only sold exactly ONE snake, and ONE leopard gecko the entire weekend. Those kinds of shows are tremendous blows to your ego and feelings of self worth. But the Tampa show was often like that. You learned to not have high expectations going into that show. I think one of the last shows we did was when we discovered that the promoters were happily providing bus transportation to the walk-in public to the local casino. What the???? They are taking OUR potential customers and busing them to a casino so they can lose their snake buying money there? Seriously?? Needless to say, we dropped those shows from our yearly itinerary.

We very seldom did one day shows. Just too much work and hassle doing a show to not have that Saturday night when we could relax between the two days of the show. It quickly became "two day show" or "we don't go". I just did NOT want to set up and break down on the same day for a show.

Once we did a show out in San Diego, CA. Man what a fiasco that turned out to be. I felt like we were going out to the mecca of reptile breeders, and I was actually pretty antsy about going out there. We had to fly out there, as were the animals we wanted to take, and the materials for setting up our tables. So we had to travel pretty light, of course. And our overhead was really pretty high, but I had high expectations. Then the airline lost one of our boxes for several hours, and I was about ready to have a heart attack. Setting up for a show is stressful enough and this one was extremely so, even without not knowing if that box would ever show up. But it did, and cost us another trip to the airport in that rental car. Oh yeah, and then we had to ship back home everything that didn't sell. NEVER did that again.

Anyway, I printed up labels for the deli cups before packing the boxes for the show, and during setup I was busily putting the new labels in preparation. Note above about the "mecca" comment. I felt I needed to be technically correct with my IDs, because some of the really big wigs in the business would likely be walking by my table. So I labeled all the corns as being "Red Rat Snakes". That IS technically correct, you see. Well, you have no idea how many times I had people looking over the deli cups, and then asking me, "Do you have any corn snakes?" I thought my head would explode several times. Of course, we did have several people look at Connie's leopard geckos and made the classic "California" comment, "Gnarly, dude!"

Anyway, if it hadn't been for a guy who walked up to our table about 5 minutes before closing and purchased a pair of Costa Rican milk snakes from us, we would certainly have been in the red for that weekend. So we kinda broke even. I think. The way I looked at it, we could have just wasted all our time and effort going out to San Diego for the weekend, or on the other hand, looked at it as us getting a nearly "free" weekend in San Diego. The later thought just made it easier to swallow how that weekend turned out, I guess.

BTW, after a few shows, I did some figuring, and as a result of that figuring, my normal "50% off sale" every year came into being. You see, I figured out that in most cases, the bottom line for doing most smaller shows would work out to being the same if we had just stayed home and I sold a bunch of snakes at 50 percent of their list prices. With the overhead associated and the invariable "show prices" we had to display, this pretty much worked out to being an accurate rule of thumb. So we just took that to heart and eventually stopped doing most shows, and really only doing the larger one or two each year that we did best at.

But that sort of thing is a learning curve that everyone who does shows has to figure out on their own. I once had someone blast me for looking at shows as being from a commercial perspective and thought I should be happy to do shows just for the opportunity to meet and talk with people. Sure, it is nice to do that, and if I were only paying the walk-in admission fee, and only have to drive to the show, without a ton of preparation, it would certainly be a viable point of argument. I'm not sure the other party ever got my point, however.

So the point of all this is, I guess, I STILL get nightmares about doing shows. So what is that telling you?