Market Madness

Twice each year, in January and sometime in the summer (between June and July), all of the gift shop managers across the country go to one of three places to buy all of their merchandise for the next 6 or so months. Whether a shop goes to the Las Vegas, Dallas, or Atlanta market depends on the location of the store as well as the volume of product needed to stock the store.

For my particular gift shop, as a small store located in a hospital, we are not big enough to warrant the more expensive flight to Atlanta, Georgia – and as it is also the largest of the three markets mentioned, it definitely isn’t worth it! This January, after less than a month managing the gift shop, I was able to get on a plane for Las Vegas to experience my very first Market experience. Armed with business cards, my federal tax resale number, and credit information, I boarded a plane around 11 am on Saturday, January 25th.

The flight was uneventful, as we all hope they will be, and as soon as we arrived got an Uber to our hotel on the strip. We dropped our luggage off, keeping the essentials, and got a Lyft over to the World Market Center and the 16 floors and 345,000 square feet of vendors in an outdoor space with temporary exhibitors called The Pavilions. As soon as we walked into the building I was in awe. On each floor that we passed as we rode up the elevators in this grand building there were glass windows on every side of the companies’ showrooms, each display glittering with Christmas and Halloween decor and bustling with buyers. At several of the showrooms representatives stood outside passing out freebies emblazoned with the companies’ name and location in the building, for easy reference later.

That first day we wandered all over the place, peeking into showrooms to see what price point they had, and placing orders of anywhere between $200 to $4,000. Around 6 that evening we gathered together our things, went to the Cheesecake Factory for dinner, and crashed at the hotel.

The next day we got up early, grabbed Starbucks for breakfast, and got on the shuttle over to the World Market building. This time we had a bit more direction, and got right into buying. Mid day we met up with a few of my past supervisors from the Medical Center in Murray and headed over to the Pavilions to check out the smaller retailers. Here we found beautiful vegan leather purses that we just had to have, so we placed an order. We also found gorgeous hand carved olive wood nativities that just HAD to happen… As you walked through the aisles and aisles of merchandise and retailers, it feels like the state fair mixed with an event at the Mountain America Expo Center in Sandy. We picked up ‘lunch’ at around 3:30 and sat outside in the sun, resting our feet. After meandering through the aisles we hadn’t reached before, we decided to call it a day and got the shuttle back to the hotel. This evening we didn’t just crash, and I pulled out my laptop to start a spreadsheet of all of the expenses we had accumulated thus far so we better knew where we were at on our budget. After working through the numbers, I went right to bed simply exhausted.

The next few days flew by in a blur of tired feet and exhaustion, punctuated with the adrenaline rush of finding an awesome deal or a new product we just had to have. The experience was over just as fast as it had started, and I got in an Uber headed back to the airport on Thursday, January 30th, and arrived home late that evening.

A week after we had come home my boss was already getting our reservations for the hotel and making arrangements for the flight to Dallas in June, so we can do it all again!