I heard one more year at the Westin before they move the show to a bigger place in Schaumburg.

Iffy if we will be back as a vendor next year as we were one of the ones with significantly decreased sales from last year.

From talking with other vendors it seems about equally split between those of us who were down significantly and those that had great sales. I think traffic flow and room layout was a contributing factor, but not sure how much. Having all the Sterns in their own room seemed to take a big part of the traffic away from the vendor rooms. One vendor even commented that they had to go drag their best customers out of the Stern/Marco room to buy the stuff they normally buy every year from them.

For us it's as much about relationships as it is about total sales, but the sales decrease will probably give us a tough decision next year on if/how we attend as a vendor.

Each show has it's own personality and we adjust what we bring to sell based on that. Relationships are big for us, so we have to factor that in a bit too.

In general, we pay 1/2 as much for the booth and sell twice as much stuff at TPF than we do at Expo. This year Expo was 25% of the sales of TPF.

This year we stayed offsite at a hotel that was a third of the price and included a free breakfast as well as driving our own truck with a trailer vs renting a sprinter van like we do for TPF to help a bit with the lesser booth sales at expo.

At our local show in July we sold twice as much as the previous year, so it doesn't seem to be an overall trend yet.

We also brings tons of Pinball parts, unique artwork, and Knick knacks like enamel pins, patches, tshirts. Generally we have 40-60 feet of booth space frontage.

What's weird is that our local show sales (SFGE in July) were more than double this year vs last, and TPF sales this year were great and up slightly. It was just Expo that was way down for us for some reason.

I did hear that it seemed like attendance was up though. I think overall it was a positive move in the right direction for Expo, but I do believe it's going to be difficult to get vendors next year. If we come at all, it will be a hugely stripped down and much smaller booth. Or maybe we will just be attendees instead of vendors as we love talking with people and building up the relationships that make this pinball stuff so fun most of the time.

It could be that the Groupons and stuff that they doing to increase attendance are bringing in more people that are just interested in playing vs collecting at the moment.

Paul