Return of the Trade Show

 

Recently I read an article in Sports Illustrated that documented how the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles represented a quantum leap in technology, unveiling such radical concepts as EMS or electronic messaging system – the precursor to today’s email, as well as digital judging and scoring for various events.

This mind you followed the 1976 Games in Montreal, which was originally slated to cost $250 million but eventually carried a $1.4 billion price tag, a debt Canada was not able to discharge until 2006. Then four years later, the U.S. was one of 65 countries to boycott the Games in Moscow. Just months before the LA Games, Newsweek ran an article positing the uncomfortable question “Are the Games Dead?”

I bring up this bit of past history because for nearly a year, I held similar feelings about trade shows and conferences. For 18 months most of the large annual gatherings in the accounting space and countless other sectors were either being held virtually or canceled altogether. I was ready to write their respective epitaphs and do not let anyone, anywhere tell you that attending a conference via Zoom or Microsoft Teams is the same as sitting in a live lecture or conversing in person to a vendor.

It isn’t and never will be.

An unfortunate by-product of the COVID-19 pandemic was that many companies were forced to lay off a large portion of their employees dedicated to conferences.

But the trade show is coming back, slowly but surely. Already some of last year’s virtual events have morphed into live confabs, several of which have given the attendees the option of attending in person or virtually. And I am sure I can speak for thousands of others when I say I’m more than happy to witness its gradual resurrection.

I attended my first trade show in 1988, a gargantuan gathering of more than 100,000 people sardined into the cavernous McCormick Place in Chicago. I learned many things during that three-day conclave, perhaps the most painful being that there are two types of conditioning – the standard gym-induced shape and what I call “trade show shape” and believe me the two are mutually exclusive. It is one thing to hoist 200-pound barbells and execute countless burpees, but quite another to stand on your feet for up to 10 hours and examine hundreds of product booths. Shortly afterward the only two words I could utter were “Epsom salts.”

But I digress.

So, as the trade show and conference circuit beings to slowly emerge from its 18-month hibernation, it will be a refreshing signal that things are inching closer to normal.

And I will be sure that I have an ample supply of comfortable shoes.