The Bazaar is Dead, Long Live the Bazaar

[featherynscale]

Thanks to the wonders of antibiotics, I am back at work today. Sadly, triadruid seems to be succumbing to some of my various and sundry germs, and is at home resting. I have profound hopes that we will all three be well by the time we leave to go on vacation in a few weeks. I have it on good authority that it was 85 in Miami on Saturday, so I'm looking forward to getting a little bit of that.

The Bazaar went off with only a few hitches. A few people didn't show up, a few people did show up who I didn't expect, the parking lot was wretched and probably drove off shoppers, and late in the day, we almost had some sort of gang war between bazaar vendors and a group of people who wanted to put on a dance show. Other than that, it was fine. Gaia made exactly as much profit as we always make. It doesn't seem to make a difference where we have the event, how much we pay in advertising and space rental, how many vendors we have or who they are, our profit is exactly the same every year. I have no idea why.

On Sunday, we considered ourselves to be profoundly Off Duty, so we spent a lot of the day playing mindless video games and trying to establish a definitive set of cartesian coordinates to describe the Pirate/Ninja/Monkey/Robot thing. This mostly failed, as we found that it is almost impossible to define any quality that reliably differentiates pirates from monkeys. More research will almost certainly be required.

We also did a little bit of espionage, and went down to the Holly Holly Holly Holidays show, which seems to be the main competition for the Winter Bazaar, both for vendors and for shoppers. (I think there are three Hollys in the name. Some perverse part of my brain often renders the show name as Polly Wolly Doodle Days, but what can you do?) We picked up some good ideas, which will need to roll around in my brain and rattle out at the 2007 Bazaar Planning Meeting, which we'll probably do in a few weeks. Ah yes, it's the biggest, most stressful event of the year, so as soon as I finish one, I have to start planning the next one. I'm not in charge of the next one, though. I mean it this time.

Comments

[diermuid.livejournal.com]

I was mainly happy that you weren't the same weekend as Kris Kinder. Although I never made it out there. I had no big shopping plans for the Gaia Bazaar, but I usually at least stop by. Especially since my Raffle-Fu has been awesome.

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the thing is, if we want to do the event in our usual timeframe, there is now apparently no day that we can do it that is not against either Holly Holly or Kris Kinder. So I don't know what we're going to do about that, since we share vendors with both things. Bleh. Who runs Kris Kinder, do you know? We really need to get on some sort of announcement list with them.

Kris Kinder

[zianuray.livejournal.com]

Might check with the local SCA group -- they'd surely know, since it's an SCA event!

[diermuid.livejournal.com]

I forget who the autocrat this year was, but for next year you can always ask... the guy I armor with on Tuesdays is the Baron. The autocrat will change from year to year but Trevor is a good business-minded person. If I explain the plight then we can all work together, he understands that pagans, rennies, and SCA are all sort of interconnected.

I was wondering why no one does this stuff earlier though... by December most of my trinket shopping is done. I might just be weird though.

[zylch.livejournal.com]

Hrm. What's the rationale for having it on Saturday, again? Just that it's a better shopping day than Sunday? Or was it that an all-day event on Sunday was conflicting with SMUUCh's services? If the latter, then could we avoid doubling up with KK or Fouraitch by moving back to Sunday but at a non-SMUUCh venue?

Also, what on earth is this about Attack Jazzercisers?

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

We stopped doing it on Sunday initially because of the conflict with SMUUCh. It is an artifact, for sure, but it's also not really relevant, since AFAIK, all the events we wish to not run against run on both Saturday and Sunday.

[kittenpants.livejournal.com]

We were beset by *two different* dance groups, actually. In the morning, while we were setting up, a group of about a dozen came in with a boombox full of disco and R&B, and they did tae-bo and pilates in the middle of a group of vendors setting up their tables. Odd, but not disruptive. And hey, free floor show, and I got to do the YMCA while setting up the gift-wrap table. :)

It was around 4:30 that the 60 or so people for the dance party started congregating in the same area, insisting that they'd paid for the space and that we had to move out. When we moved some tables but didn't leave the mall, they decided to surround the area, glare at us, block traffic, and threaten to knock over tables and break things. Some of our vendors started to pack up to move further out of their way, but then mall security, and the mall manager confimed that we did indeed have the right to the space, and that the hip-hop raver brute squad would just have to use one of the other dozen empty areas in the mall.

Also, it turned out that they had neither paid for the space nor told the mall that it would be a teenage dance party -- they'd gotten the space *donated* for "a six-year old's birthday party".