Antiques shows in decline: the "bad economy"

Over Christmas break I was looking over the current Antique Week (a Midwestern trade newspaper). One article noted that a show organizer was lowering booth rents; the explanation was that the bad economy was hurting sales, forcing many dealers to leave the business.

Now we're hardly partying like it's 1999, but the bad economy claim has to be taken with a big chunk of salt. Although I've heard it time and again from antique and collectible show organizers, group shop managers, and the like, what we're really hearing are the wails of those who have lost out as eBay has pulled their business online.

It's expensive and time-consuming to attend a show, whether as a seller or a buyer. Yet in most cases the merchandise is less fresh (that is to say, more already-picked-over) than ever, while the most motivated buyers have become spoiled for choice online. Undoubtedly some dealers have left the business, or have had to take other employment to make ends meet; others, however, have taken advantage of online opportunities, and are doing better than ever before. Those who had and have retained access to a steady supply of fresh goodies have done well indeed. Those who made their markups as middlemen, links in a now-drastically-shortened supply chain, have seen much of their business evaporate.

Of course, the beneficiaries of these changes are too busy keeping up to crow about it -- and they tend to work in isolation, further contributing to the lack of counterbalance to the laments of the offline traders. This is not to say that the shift from real-world to online venues is entirely benign; in fact, collectors without real-world experience are too often taken in by both crooked dealers and substandard merchandise, being cut off from a community of experts who may be easily approachable in person but low-profile to the point of invisibility online. And though new collectors have access to more information than ever before, they sometimes fail to make good sense of it without access to more advanced collectors -- online forums not always being a sufficient substitute, for all sorts of reasons.

Posted by David on December 31, 2004 12:15 PM