Last week several members of the RSR team attended Internet Retailer’s annual conference and expo. Typically, IRCE prohibits anyone with the term “analyst ” in their title from press credentials, something we’ve gotten around in past years by volunteering our time as judges for their retailer of the year awards. We volunteered our time again this year, but no dice.

So as it turns out, the only session my partner Nikki Baird or I got to attend (because we legit snuck in), was to watch our partner Paula Rosenblum deliver a speech on Dynamic Pricing. Apart from that, I can’t speak to the content of the sessions, which drastically undermines the value of a) taking time out of work to attend an event and b) ultimately reporting on said event for everyone who reads this newsletter. So the only question I can answer is, “How was the show floor? “

In a word, it was excellent.

As regular readers of this newsletter know, some of the questions we ask each vendor we visit whenever we attend a trade show is how the show has been for them. How’s traffic? How about scheduled meetings vs. random pop-ins? How strong are the titles of the people in attendance? And nearly everyone we spoke to was happy this year.

Yes, traffic on the show floor by early Thursday afternoon was pretty light and we heard quite a few grumbles about that. In fact, by about 1pm that afternoon Nikki and I started to feel like tasty-looking snacks for zombies as we walked past increasingly aggressive booth attendants. Sure these people (usually of the young and attractive sort, of course) were well-behaved on Wednesday morning. But as floor traffic started to thin out they’d start yelling to you, jumping out in front of you – that’s when anyone who’s ever walked a show floor with a non-vendor badge knows that it’s time to go!

But on Wednesday morning, Wednesday afternoon, even Thursday morning: everyone we visited was full of smiles. We were told time and again that the number of unscheduled visits from retail decision-makers with serious buying questions had exceeded everyone’s expectations. Sure, the smartest vendor sets up as many pre-scheduled meetings as they can – but random pop-ins aren’t something they can control. That’s up to show promoters. And the folks at IRCE seemed to have done an excellent job making sure there’d be enough retailers in attendance to provide virtually every booth we spoke to with a surprisingly high number of unexpected pop-ins. Apparently, as Nikki speculated midway through the 2^nd day, people really do still put together a short list of vendors they want to see – on their own schedule – back-to-back-to-back in one day. Sure, an online briefing might be less expensive, but the amount of harassment that comes from it still might not make it easier.

Needless to say, the contrast between the last show I attended – Shoptalk – and this one was about as stark as it gets. At Shoptalk, the content was as strong as any I’ve ever seen. The entire model was something I wrote about glowingly in a couple of different articles here in Retail Paradox Weekly. And virtually every vendor I spoke with at IRCE wanted to know more about our impressions of that show.

But that said, apparently there’s still room in the world for the more traditional model as well, as evidenced by the number of happy people we spoke with in Chicago last week.