Non-Event

I went to a pair of events this summer, a Renaissance faire and a gaming exposition, that are normally annual events but were canceled last year due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Both times I'd guessed that attendance would be very light, and both times I was wrong. While the gaming exposition wasn't anywhere nearly as crowded as it had been in prior years, there was still a pretty decent crowd there; my concerns that it may have turned out to be a ghost town were unfounded. As for the Renaissance faire, the crowd may have been smaller than it had been previously, but I really couldn't tell.

But what was very noticeable in both instances was a sharp decrease in the number of vendors and exhibitors on hand. Once one moved away from the main gate of the faire, large swaths of empty space where vendors used to set up were visible, and for the gaming expo, there was really only one major company in attendance.

It made for an interesting disconnect. People are looking to return to medium and large-scale in-person events, and organizers are willing to put them on, but the attractions themselves are starting to become comfortable with staying away. I suspect as businesses learn to connect with their customer bases online and via other "virtual" and remote methods, the return on investment will lessen, leaving mainly those businesses that rely on foot traffic and face-to-face interactions to fill out venues. As with a lot of things, this was likely a shift that was accelerated, rather than created, by the pandemic. Watching the future unfold on fast-forward makes evident things that previously may have been too slow to easily notice. But of course, it also hides things that once may have unfolded slowly enough to be visible. So we'll see how the disruptions shake out in the end.