Friday
I got up at 6:45 AM and tiptoed around, trying not to wake the five other people in the room. After my morning ablutions, I headed down to start Artists Alley signups. For those unfamiliar with the process: Sign ups were to start at 7:30 AM each day. We had 64 tables available, and many more artists than that wanting space. Unfortunately, this meant that in order to guarantee a spot, the line-up started at around 3:30 AM. I walked in at 7 AM to a HUGE crowd of people. Hoo boy, was this going to be fun. I chatted with the Dorsai (1) a bit then started signing people up at 7:30 AM. We had 76 people sign up, and it worked out well, since several people didn’t show up when set-up started at 11:30 AM so most of the overflow folks were able to squeeze in.
Artists Alley and Con Store ran extremely well. We have a good process for sales, and while there are occasionally small problems to deal with, it pretty much runs itself. It helps a lot that most of the cashiers (Brophey, Rasslor, Cnipur, Danruk, Kari, Galen (wolffit) and Grandma and Grandpa Kage – dedicated and efficient folks, every one of ’em!) were experienced. Kage’s aunt and uncle helped out as well, and that worked even better than I had hoped. The fact that it ran itself was good because it left me with more time to patrol the Alley, looking for inappropriate material or rules violations, as well as to answer any questions the artists might have. Then came time for closeout.
A brief digression: Artists Alley works by selling for the artists on a consignment basis. This means Anthrocon collects the taxes for the artists, and they don’t have to worry about getting a Pennsylvania tax license (which must be pretty formidable, according to MelSkunk!). The downside of this is that at the end of each day, the artists have to get paid for their work.
Dan and I worked for a couple of weeks to streamline the Artists Alley payout process, and I think we came up with an excellent solution: when you have a complicated process with multiple steps and a staff that you don’t have time to train, the most efficient way to solve the problem is to throw people at it, which is what we did – we broke the process into small steps that each person was responsible for. The downside of this is that we needed a lot of people to make payout work, and our wonderful friends came to our assistance. In addition to some of the nice folks who were cashiers staying over, we also had the help of Aerofox, Loriana, Zenwolph, Linnaeus, Chouette, and Datahawk. Thanks so much, folks! (And don’t be surprised if you hear a little cry for help next year…) The payout process is pretty good, I think, the next thing to improve is the delay from when the last transaction is completed on the registers to when the first payout takes place; this year the delay was as bad as 15 minutes. Not good. Perhaps if payout didn’t actually take place at the registers (after all, there’s nothing that says we have to do it there) we could set up quickly and be ready to start payout the minute we clear all of the customers out of the Alley. Something to think about. Payout for first day was approximately $8,000, I believe.
After payout, I was exhausted. I went up to the room and eventually the rest of my roommates showed up and we ordered pizza. Life was good. I was tired. I had Gray Goose vodka. Mmmm, yummy. I took a quick tour of the Art Show during the Artists’ Reception, then I went to bed a little before midnight.
(1) Dorsai – The Dorsai Irregulars, a group which provides Anthrocon with its security. I can’t begin to say how impressed I am with these folks – they’re convention veterans, and they are good. Every single Dorsai I talked to was friendly, helpful, and polite. The head of the Dorsai contingent at Anthrocon, Rene, was a really nice guy and a lot of fun to talk to, as well.