Michael Hart

Still, You Hear Stories

As I try to crystallize my thoughts here, euphemisms keep popping into my head. When I “read the tea leaves,” do I see “light at the end of the tunnel” or am I “putting lipstick on a pig?”

Here at Tradeshow Week, we are just entering what is always the busiest couple of months for us. This week we are getting ready for the issue that includes our first-ever Green Innovation Awards. At the same time, we’re making all kinds of preparations for our TSW Fastest 50 event Nov. 13-15 – and we’re looking ahead to the mega-issue we always put out to coincide with Expo! Expo! IAEE’s Annual Meeting & Exhibition in early December.

Everybody on the editorial staff is busier than ever interviewing show managers, talking about shows and preparing stories. Nobody we talk to would claim that the industry is spinning on all cylinders, but we are certainly hearing more and more anecdotes all the time of shows that are headed back in the right direction and signals that things are looking up.

Now, having said that, next week we will publish the results of our third-quarter report on show performance. I haven’t seen the preliminary figures yet, but I’m not optimistic: I fully expect shows to be down again compared with last year’s third quarter, maybe by as much as 10 percent.

Still, in another universe, people right now are walking around feeling optimistic because the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 10,000 yesterday, even if their own 401(k) quarterly statements continue to tell a sad story, even if it’s likely the national unemployment rate will hit the inevitable 10-percent mark one of these days soon, even if some of our houses aren’t yet worth what we paid for them.

I’m like many of you. I grasp at the anecdotal evidence, the stories, for reason to be optimistic; then chase it down with the hard, cold facts to keep it in perspective.

Still … we are hearing those good-news stories, even if they are peppered in with the less-than-encouraging statistics. That’s something, at least.

Posted by Michael Hart on October 15, 2009 | Comments (0)