The Show to End All Shows

I was at a trade show recently, a tabletop, the kind with lots of different types of businesses showing their wares and people like me who both buy from and serve those customers, who had bought tickets to attend.

Soon I noticed a lot of us were having a hard time hearing each other. Scratch that. None of us could really hear each other.

I was curious to know what was causing the problem. Someone said it was a demo, and pointed me to a space outside the sort of tent they’d set up for the show—you know, the kind that forms the perimeter, making a wall. There were three or four rows of booths, and on the outside of one wall a number of speakers were showing pictures of this and that and telling us, at an impressive volume, why they were just what we needed, right now.

I saw a board and asked where the sound person might be. No one knew. One person thought he had gone home.

Seeing someone I know a bit from the organization, I asked if maybe they could turn it down just a hair so we could hear each other.

“No,” she said. “This is where everybody is supposed to be now.”

Actually, if everybody attending the show and everybody who had a booth at the show were in that space, we wouldn’t fit. There wasn’t enough room. And out where we were, there wasn’t enough audible space for us to hear each other. We were all, except for the people yelling at us, in a kind of limbo, as though we’d been turned into extras in someone else’s movie.

People sometimes ask me, “Do you specialize in one industry?”

“No,” I tell them. “My clients range from designers to lawyers to retailers. I like it that way.”

Sometimes I also tell them that I think depending on one sector is unhealthy in business, or I tell them that I once had one big client and we did a lot of great work but then that ended and I was sort of standing on one foot. I learned the lesson.

I know a man who used to be a millionaire. He had a lot of money in the stock market, and it was all in one kind of stock. He’s been struggling ever since.

Well, the recession hit most people I know pretty hard. Something like that—where a few people pick the world’s pocket—is hard to plan for. But putting all your eggs in one basket was never a very good idea.

At the moment there’s a technology boom in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a lot of other places, too. I’m glad to see the increase in business, happy about all the creative people who often populate those companies being able to contribute new ideas, invent new products that will improve things for a lot of people. 

Others find the boom less friendly, the way that booming sound at the show was hard on the ear. The boom hurts some people—those priced out of their apartments or uprooted from the place they have done business for generations (I can think of one building where a whole world has disappeared, because the owners paid triple for the property and think it’ll be more convenient to just get one check each month from a tech company or two.).

Most of the people who’ve been priced out or pushed out will still land on their feet, thank goodness. But the notion that we should give everything to one industry and ignore others, that the money people paid for those booths at the show doesn’t matter and the people who paid to attend the show don’t count, except as customers for one or two companies in one sector—where I come from, we call that approach, “bad news.” 

That term might be a good one to keep in mind. Because despite what my acquaintance said, one industry alone is not “where everybody’s supposed to be now,” or ever was. There’s a reason farmers alternate their crops. They grow more over time.

©2013 Laynie Tzena.