No contest this year. Unfortunately, when we announced our contest this year (actually was scheduled last year, 2025) we got an… underwhelming… response from potential attendees and vendors. When vendors don’t buy or reserve tables, and we don’t get any enthusiasm from past and future potential attendees / patrons, then hosting a show is not economically viable.
Things become even worse when there is active opposition and negative criticism from other scale modeling clubs, both from their formal and informal leaders. These folks will come to our shows, and go through the vendor area like locusts, but then they don’t enter the show or buy raffle tickets. They love to hate us, and they are perfectly happy to take what they can get, but aside from making some of the vendors happy, they do very little else to support the show. They actively boycott the model exhibition and show and refuse to buy raffle tickets. They will line up to get in, shop the vendors, and then give us the metaphorical one-finger salute on their way back out the door.
A lot of our exhibitor / entrant growth over the past couple of years has been from modelers who are not affiliated with regular clubs (since so many of the “traditional” modeling crowd have boycotted our show), however, these attendees don’t give us any usable feedback or promotion. Without their feedback, we have no way to judge or predict entrant participation.
So, we were forced to make a decision to pull the plug on the 2025 contest because vendors were not buying tables, and we couldn’t get any handle on what we might get for patronage. There is a go / no-go cutoff date based on the number of tables sold vs. how many are left. If you can imagine grafting these numbers on a timeline, then what you get is a prediction of how many tables will be sold by the date of the contest. You know how many you have to sell by the day of, and if you’re on track to fall short… So, when you reach that decision date, you have to make the call to go on with the show or cancel in time to get your venue deposit back. We didn’t want to, but the numbers just were not lining up for us.
Contests are funded by a combination of proceeds from vendor table sales, raffle ticket sales and registration fees. Each revenue source has to meet a predicted gross (which we base on our historical records of past shows and event growth). The total gross has to meet or exceed the expenses. It’s that simple. We are perfectly happy to run our shows on a “break even” basis and have done so in the past. We do like to make some small profit to cover us for inflation cost increases for the next year, but we cannot be good stewards of our club’s resources if we have reason to believe that we will probably be in the red.
So, we canceled out 2025 show and reschedule and replanned with the venue for the 2026 S.I.D.N.A. Sale, Show and Raffle. The sale is a reduced vendor event. The show portion is mostly a public display opportunity for club members, although, we’ll have some limited space available for others (on a first come, first served basis). The raffle will be as large as what we would have had with our regular (if we had held it). It will be REALLY LARGE with a LOT of prizes. (We generally run very large raffles, year after year.)
We really felt that we owed it to the many manufacturers and others who had donated prizes for our regular show raffle (many manufacturers look at such donations as advertising / promotion expenses and have a reasonable expectation of a promotion return on that expense).
The top prize for the raffle will be a Foredom Flexi Tool (~$500 value!). There are also a large number of other new, premium scale model kits along with modeling supplies. The kits cover the whole range of scale modeling genres, so there’re prizes for every scale modeling taste.
So… For everyone who’s got this far with this post, do yourself a favor. If you enjoy going to model shows, be sure to let your hosts know that you’ve had a good time and want to do it again the next year. Tell your friends and everyone else (the owners of your LHS and / or gaming store, too). When you’re shopping the vendors at a show, talk to them. Tell them you appreciate that they’re at the show (and buy something!). Be positive and enthusiastic with the vendors about the show. Tell them how much you enjoy it and how much you look forward to it each year. To be brutally honest, vendor table sales are what mostly pay for the venue. No vendors = no show.
(If you’re a vendor, realize that your table purchase is an investment in not only your current product sales but also an investment in having a venue to sell at next year. If the costs of tables has gone up because of inflation, understand that no one in the hosting model club is making any money off of that. We don’t like it any more than you do, but we can’t host shows by paying for them out of our own pockets. We balance the prices for all of the revenue streams to keep the patron and vendor costs as low as possible for everyone. However, when the venue raises their rental prices, we have to raise what we’re asking, too.)
While you’re at it, buy a few raffle tickets. If you don’t want to hang around for the raffle draws, finds some kid or junior modeler in the venue and give him or her your unwanted tickets. If you get a raffle prize you don’t want, give it away to some kid and make his or her day! Make your own investment for the future of the hobby
If you find that you get bored sitting around the venue waiting for the awards ceremony, get involved. Volunteer to help with the judging. If you don’t feel confident judging, ask if you can join a judging team to watch and learn how it’s done. You might find that it’s actually pretty easy and educational and after a watching a few models being judged, maybe you’ll feel up to it. There are NEVER enough judges, and the speed that the judging gets done depends on how many people are involved. Consider that most model clubs only have a dozen or so members. Look around and count the heads of the people working the show and what’s left are the ones trying to do all the judging. The best way to speed things up and get the awards ceremony started quicker is to HELP JUDGE. Every modeler sitting in the peanut gallery twiddling his or her thumbs waiting on the awards is one more modeler who could be helping with the judging.
Understand that model shows and exhibitions are a lot of hard work and expense for the hosting club. It might be fun for you to attend, but for the folks putting it on, a lot of times there’s no chance to shop the vendors or play in the raffle. It’s a largely thankless job. We do it because we love the hobby and want to give back to the modeling community, but we’re never too proud to gladly accept some help.
If you think that something could be done better, don’t just complain to your mates and then talk the show down on social media. Find someone in the hosting club and talk to them about the problem. Offer some ideas or solutions.
