Here is my final report for Artists Alley/Con Store at Anthrocon 2005. The short version: We kicked much ass!

Artists Alley and Con Store Report for Anthrocon 2005

First and foremost, Artists Alley and Con Store (AA and CS) would not have happened were it not for a dedicated group of people. Many, many thanks to the AA/CS staff, which included Danruk, Linnaeus, Galen, Cnipur, Chouette, Rama, and Wilma and Sam Conway (aka Grandma and Grandpa Kage). Likewise, thanks to KBear, Benjie, and DaveQat, who volunteered for no recompense at all, to Takaza for taking time out of writing the daily newsletter to help out (and keep me sane!), and finally to Datahawk, Emaleth, and Arcane, for assisting AA/CS as well as working on Dealers Room staff. It is because of all of these fine folks that AA/CS was such a huge success this year.

Dealing with things chronologically, let’s start with set-up. As seemingly always happens, set-up was already in progress when we arrived early Thursday afternoon. Kellic was setting up the AA filing boxes and CS shelves, and all of the merchandise was already at the CS table. Also as always, Grandma and Grandpa Kage were incredibly helpful in pulling the CS merchandise out of boxes and arraying it on the shelves. We had a slight glitch when it became apparent that we couldn’t run X or Z reports on the AA registers without the password that no one knew, but some quick resetting and reprogramming fixed that plus I learned how to program the registers, which isn’t a bad thing to know anyway.

I had a slight issue with signage, or rather a complete lack thereof. There were no signs for Artists Alley, or to draw the distinction between AA and the Dealers Room. I printed out some signs at the last minute, but the drawback to that is that I was limited to 8.5″ x 11″. I found a broken easel in Ops that I pressed into service and that worked for the weekend. In the future, I strongly recommend large, 200-point-font signs to label all function spaces (AA, Dealers Room, Art Show, Gaming, etc.) even if it is obvious what is contained therein. While AC had some signage this year, it was sparse at best and the type was too small for a quick scan to figure out where things are. This seems to be a historical problem and, if someone is available, it would be good to have a specific person tasked with producing direction and labeling signs. MFF makes signage the responsibility of Publications, who usually delegates that to an individual – that works for us, but maybe not AC. Something to think about, anyway.

Artists Alley sign-up went amazingly well. This was the first year we were implementing a lottery system for seats for all three days and I was worried about how the artists might accept the new system. I needn’t have worried. The artists seemed to understand the need for the system and were willing to work with it. The good news is that we never needed to actually conduct a lottery. For the 80 seats in AA, on Friday we had 66 artists sign up, 66 again on Saturday, and 51 on Sunday. We did end up with a lot of artists coming in after we were open requesting seats, which is how on Saturday we had an almost-full room, with 78 artists by the end of the day.

The separate room for the AA sign-ups worked well, except on Sunday when there was a scheduling conflict with the Christian Furs panel. I apologized profusely to Kamau, who took the mixup with good humor, and we relocated to the room next door. The sign-ups had the added bonus of giving me time to communicate with the artists prior to opening, reminding them of rules, etc. The only problem that arose with the sign-ups was that there were mixed messages between the website, the autoresponder, and the program book on whether signups began at 8 AM or 10 AM on Friday, but that was easily corrected with a couple of well-placed signs.

Con Store operation was equally smooth, in spite of a few bumps early on. Next year, there really needs to be a complete sheet of bar codes for all merchandise in hand before the store opens; the late arrival of such a sheet this year resulted in a couple of confused radio calls and some small panic on my part. I believe there was also one item that was misprogrammed in the register, but Giza took care of that problem quickly. Other than that, CS worked exactly as it should. Grandma and Grandpa Kage were a tremendous help in setting up and in teardown; in fact, I worry that I relied upon them too much. If needed, perhaps it would be helpful if they have a volunteer to help out next year (assuming they will be in attendance and willing to work Con Store again). The manual credit card machine seemed to work OK, and the cheat sheet of instructions I wrote for it was easy to follow. One minor issue: we need better communication between CS, Ops, and Registration about T-shirts. If we’re handing out entire (or partially-full) boxes of T-shirts from the Con Store, why are we even bothering to keep track of how many of each size we give out? If required, that’s fine, but I’m just wondering if we’re causing ourselves more work than necessary.

Con Store is easy; Artists Alley – that’s where things get more complex. First up: cashier training. I’ve learned that if I send people information before the convention, don’t assume that they’ve read it when the con comes around (and to be fair, these aren’t small documents – they’re 8- and 17-page treatises, densely worded). Because of that, next year I plan on having a hands-on training session with all of the cashiers who are available on Thursday night, perhaps just before the all-hands staff meeting, or Friday morning. Likewise, the cheat sheet that I made up for transactions needs a little work. Some steps were missing, and that led to some confusion for first-time cashiers. Finally, some clarification is needed: were voids handled properly? I don’t believe we kept register receipts for voided transactions, and hopefully that won’t cause any issues later on (though that may explain the appearance and disappearance of a $11,000+ transaction on Sunday).

Cashier scheduling is also an area that can use some improvement. While I had exactly the right amount of people for staff, I had to scramble a bit when I found out that we weren’t in fact closing at 3 PM on Saturday (though I can’t begin to explain my relief that we weren’t!). When I was working up the schedule, I assumed that traffic would be even on all three days, with a light crowd in the morning, then things picking up as the day went on. I scheduled accordingly, with two cashiers opening and a third cashier not coming in until 1 or 2 PM. What actually happened was that there was a large crowd on Friday morning, then busy for the rest of the day. On Saturday, it was pretty uniformly busy the entire day, and Sunday was pretty slow. This is definitely something to take this into consideration next year. We ran into some issues where cashiers were scheduled for only an hour, and that seemed too little time to go through the hassle of counting a drawer in or out; consequently, there were a couple of times that we had more than one cashier use a cash drawer, something that I know is trouble when it comes time to settle everything up. In the future, longer shifts are advisable, at least two hours, and less time should be given for counting in and out. I allotted thirty minutes at the beginning and end of each shift, but in reality fifteen minutes should be sufficient. Also, every cashier should run an X report at the end of their shift; it should be part of the basic procedure that you do not leave your register until you have an X report in hand.

The artists in AA seemed happy overall. I had to make four rulings over the course of the weekend. The first was on Friday, when an artist came in and set up an airbrush compressor to do body airbrushing. He was partially complete with his first customer’s face when I noticed him. I explained to him that we couldn’t provide power at all in Artists Alley and that he would have to leave, though as a gesture of goodwill I let him finish what he was doing (another fifteen minutes or so). He understood and didn’t seem too upset. The second ruling was pointing out to an artist that he had a rather risque’ image on the screensaver he had cycling. His response was amusing once he saw the image (“OH SNAP!”) and he quickly removed it. The third ruling was a polite request to cover up a bit of genitalia that was showing on a drawing, which the artist did willingly. And finally, I declined Nimir’s request to set up a massage table in the Alley, on the grounds that it would set a bad precedent (since we stress that it’s all about art). He graciously understood and I was happy to see he was able to set up in the Dealers Room later in the weekend.

Artists Alley seems to have a continuing problem on Sunday: customers who have paid for their goods from artists come to pick them up, only to find that the artist is not in the Alley that day. We do not have the staff to help track down artists elsewhere in the convention, unfortunately. In the future, I suggest two solutions for this problem: first, a large sign stating that, due to the day-to-day nature of Artists Alley, purchases and communications are the responsibility of the artist and customer. Second, a small message board for artists and customers to leave messages for one another, with the caveat that the board will be taken down at the close of the Alley on Sunday.

One final note about AA operations: some kind of public address system is really required. I blew out my voice on Friday trying to make announcements, and that really hampered me for the rest of the weekend.

At the end of each day, of course, there was Artists Alley Payout. Although things went well, the tight space we were in made logistics somewhat difficult. As for the separate parts of payout: When matching up artists’ slips, we had very few discrepancies, and those that we did have were handled well by the staff. This tells me that the artists are getting adequate information on how the Alley works. The totaling of the slips could have gone faster, but that was not the bottleneck. The biggest bottleneck in the process by far was writing receipts for the artists. We need at least one more person writing receipts – maybe two people totaling and four people writing receipts? Payment was almost fast enough, but might be improved with another person helping with paying the artists.

As far as overall speed of payout, we did very well. Payout took 45 minutes on Friday, 40 minutes on Saturday, and 30 minutes on Sunday. I suspect that, although we can work people and resources around, we are approaching the maximum efficiency for the existing paper system. The question remains, as well, how much effort is it worth to reduce the total payout time from 45 minutes to 35 minutes? As things stand, I think the process is robust and mature, and worth repeating next year.

Looking ahead to next year, I have already volunteered to manage Artists Alley and Con Store again, if Giza and Kage will have me. Among consumables expenses, we will need at least one and maybe two more receipt books for payout. As for the receipt books for artists, we should barely have enough for next year, although we’ll probably have a couple of artists who will have to switch books partway through the day. For capital expenditures, it’s pretty simple: we need a better way to move money around besides in open trays of cash. The preferred method would be to leave the drawers in the cash registers and ferry money back and forth with cash boxes. While a Point of Sale system would be nice, the system we have works reasonably well; perhaps a POS system in 2007 might be nice, but it can certainly wait.

So that sums things up. Again, many thanks to all of my staff and volunteers, and I look forward to seeing everyone at Anthrocon 2006!