Quote:
Originally Posted by Exhibitman
At the National this year I spent a good deal of time at the tables at the far side and back of the hall where the newer dealers are relegated by the priority system. They mostly have modern cards and lower cost cards. One of them told me that the dealers in that end of the room call the front of the room where the old guard vintage card dealers are "The Dead Zone" because they have comparatively low traffic and always look so depressed and miserable. I have to agree. At times you could fire a shotgun down some of the rows at the front of the hall and barely hit anyone, but I had to go toe to toe to get into some of the booths at the back. Not a problem: modern collecting has always been the gateway to vintage. When the newbies get tired of picking up Mike Trout cards because he's the next Mantle, they will start looking at Mantle cards, and so on down to the earliest cards.
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I was there Thursday thru early Saturday afternoon and I had a completely opposite experience. I found the rows in the front very busy at the times I was there. Had to wait a lot of the time to ask to look at something. Took much longer to get thru the rows going to the corporate rows in the middle than it did to go thru those back rows. Admittedly, I wasn't looking for newer stuff and may have been able to pass by more tables back there but I didn't find the rows any more crowded than in the front.
Overall it seemed that there was a lot of traffic and that dealers were busy actually selling.