Quote:
Originally Posted by WRA
Unfortunately it became a self fulfilling prophecy. Last year there was some very strong criticism on FB and MTFCA Forum. This bad press grew over time and discouraged a lot of people.
The criticism last year and the resulting changes were the final straw. They should of never broke tradition and eliminated the Thursday evening set up. With this also went the RV & Overnight camping. Thursday was more about fellowship and tradition. Somehow it got twisted into an unfair advantage for certain people.
The Friday set up didn’t work out very well with a number of vendors still covered or setting up after 11 am. There were also a number of customers who made it on the fairgrounds during set up. Saturday was a ghost town with majority of the vendor leaving Friday afternoon. In the end the changes only hurt the meet.
I go every year and it’s never as bad as people said it was. I do well as a customer and a vendor. Yes, vendor turnout was low, but I still did great and managed to find a few items I need.
I’m very glad I was able to enjoy it while it lasted.
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Interesting view on this. I personally felt it was as bad as many said. Many of the vendors who attended Chickasha are people who either side-line, -or make their living attending. Their sales, -or their purchases made at the meet are critical to their business. Allow me to explain. When was the last time you saw a tire dealer at this meet? (It has definitely been awhile). Most quit coming because it was unprofitable.
Next, if vendor count is low, -likely so are available cores for rebuilders. A carburetor rebuilder (-or a generator/starter rebuilder, et/al) needs to be able to purchase enough cores to make it worth the overhead costs to attend. The same with sellers of good merchandise. A couple of years ago I brought quite of bit of really nice or NOS parts to sell, and no one wanted to pay 'real world' prices at Chickasha. For example, I had two professionally restored radiator shells priced at $750 ea. that were near show quality and I had some tell me they would buy a repro for less than half that amount. My point is many of the people looking for and bringing top quality merchandise had quit coming ...which means the costs to attend far exceeded the value the meet brought to their sales.
As far as the unfair advantage and changing that, I think there was more to that also, -at least from my perspective and the vendors I have discussed this with. The issue regarding the Thursday set-up was attendance was down however the Erslands still had to pay for the extra day (Thursday) of fairgrounds rentals and insurance. If more vendors had attended, it probably gave them the extra revenue to help offset this. As far as the pre-setup sales, this has been going on here and other meets such as Hershey & Carlisle too. To me, it likely was the people who were unwilling to come early that were complaining about this. Like you, I have no regrets and it was enjoyable creating good memories for many years.