Booth bimbo for hire: An UP Show lament


The UP Show got cancelled, and it wasn’t a surprise. As the show shrank in size, those who had been there for years added a coda to our annual good-byes: “See you next year—knock wood.” Still, we should mourn what it was.


The Upper Midwest Hospitality Show is gone, as you’ve no doubt heard, and with it goes my 15-year run as a booth bimbo. I suppose it’s a mercy—I can’t hope to be decorative forever, and now I don’t have to face being shoved aside for someone younger and cuter.

It’s not like this was a surprise. Anyone who goes to the NRA show in Chicago can tell you about its gradual erosion of size and splendor, and out here in the provinces the sand-castle was smaller to begin with, and washed away more quickly.

The death-knell really sounded in the 1990s, when the big full-line purveyors began setting up their own shows. This couldn’t have happened 20 years ago when there were a bunch of them (remember Monarch? National Tea? Kraft? Sexton?). They were relatively equal in size, pricing, service and products, and needed a neutral forum to make their pitches.

But in the best tradition of the free market, they ate each other. Now we have two behemoths slugging it out in the Twin Cities, swollen with their half-digested former competitors and picking their teeth with the bones; and three smaller ones located in relative safety away from the black hole at the galaxy’s center. (And, thankfully, most all of them remain advertisers.)

Our big guys are the local outposts of competing continent-wide empires, and have all the pressures that quarterly profit reports and overweening pride imply. They list the advantages they provide—one-stop shopping, global buying power—and then put their minimums at $1,200 a drop to thank you for 20 years of loyal patronage. Ask an independent restaurant who the beneficiary of all this consolidation has been, and they will tell you: Restaurant Depot.

And because the big guys are bigger than their vendors, they can control how and where the vendors and buyers interact. Full-line distributors used to be the anchor tenants at trade shows, occupying almost an aisle each and putting on spectacles worthy of Las Vegas, showcasing their vendors to gather new customers. Competition was fierce and the floor was as lively as a carnival. Now they have private shows where they seem to be showcasing their customers to gather new vendors, or to put a little price discipline in the minds of the ones they have. Their presence at the open shows has been reduced to the size of a kebab maker’s little cart—but the kebab man’s sly smile reminds you that he has a magic lantern hidden somewhere under his pile of charcoal, and that everything you see at the bazaar can be had right here by rubbing the lamp.

From my perch in the Beef Council’s emporium I watched the slow decline. My tour began in the veal half of the Council’s two booths, and I stayed there until the last veal producer in Minnesota gave it up for a waste of feed money. I moved to the adult side as we shrank to one booth. Didn’t the show once have three halls in the Convention Center, then two, then one? (This year, it was to take place in the basement level.) I look back on it like the gradual failure of memory, as one piece shuts down, and another, and another. And the contents of that last room got smaller and smaller, and those of us who had been there a while began adding a coda to our annual good-byes: “See you next year—knock wood.”

I understand that trade shows of all kinds are in decline, but I don’t have to like it. In the hospitality business, your own little fiefdom quickly becomes the entire universe, and the moods of servers and the sudden appearance of a tour bus become a plague of locusts and barbarians at the gates. This is fine; hospitality is a crazy quilt of details and each scrap requires attention—but it tends to isolate us within our walls. How often does a good manager eat at places other than her own? How many chefs do you see carrying frequent-diner cards? The shows were places where we could remember that we were all in this business together, all wrestling with the same inspectors and purveyors and cooks’ habits and servers’ attitudes and customers’ irrational whims. It was the only place and time where you could share your daily after-work-beer-and-whine with people from all over the state, and discover that their gripes were exactly the same as yours, with a different cast of characters.

And now we’re stuck having a beer with Facebook. It won’t be the same.