The Bring and Buy
With the ongoing situation with new variants and masks coming back in for public transport, we’re sharing our thoughts on the Bring and Buy and the reason why we’re not implementing one at Dragonmeet, as well as what we’re doing to replace it for this year.
Bring and Buys are fantastic, there’s more chance of a bargain there than at most places in a convention, and you never known what you’re going to find. More than that, they’re an ideal place to offload all the kickstarters that you found you didn’t like after all, and most of the time, they also end up handing a good amount of cash to charity. All in all, there’s no lose to be had at a Bring and Buy.
Unless you’re a runner of conventions.
Here’s the thing about Bring and Buys, they’re busy, they’re always busy, and when you get to the size of convention of Dragonmeet, Airecon, and UK Games Expo, you have to have a computerised system in place to make sure you can log everything, paper just isn’t fast enough or reliable enough That’s the first issue.
The second issue is that you need lots of people manning them, to get the games booked in, to get the games processed, to get them on the system, then out on the shelves. At the end of the day, you need to have people around to collect up the games and process the cash outs for all those who came along. When we run the Bring and Buy at Dragonmeet, fully half our volunteers (often more) end up being put on the Bring and Buy because of the sheer volume of things being brought in. This year, many of our regular teams couldn’t make it, including the master of our Bring and Buy, Jason, and we just don’t have enough people to make it run the way it should.
But actually, neither of these is the reason we’re not having the Bring and Buy this year, that comes down to the third issue. Bring and Buys are busy, yes, but more than that, they’re frantic. As each new games comes out, there’s a scrum of people around them, and some people spend the entire day just hanging around the B&B just waiting for the possibility of bargains coming through. The problem with this is that the B&B inevitably becomes a scrum, the only place in the convention where normal rules of engagement are suspended and everyone is elbows in.
At a time like this, with things the way they are now, having something that has people diving in for bargains seems wrong, and for that reason and that reason alone, we’re suspending the bring and buy this year. It’s nothing to do with the massive backlog of unwanted kickstarters that are going to come to the first bring and buy that opens up, if things were different, we’d welcome that, the charities at the first convention that has a Bring and Buy will do very well out of that, but it’s just not the time to encourage a scrum of any sort, and that’s why we’re holding off.
What we are doing is setting up a trading post on our Discord server, where anyone attending Dragonmeet can post up what they’re looking to trade and arrange to meet up with others who are trading to swap games. At the convention, we’re putting aside the executive boardroom on the second floor for all trades to take place. There’s enough space for people to meet over the table, trade, and then enjoy the rest of the convention, but with one big difference to the Bring and Buy.
We’re not manning that room…
What this means is that you can’t bring your things and leave them in the room so that we’ll look after them, we don’t have the volunteers to manage that this year. If you want to bring a few games and spend some time in the room to see if others turn up wanting to trade, that’s fine, please be aware, if someone turns up at the front door with a container box on wheels, there’s only a small elevator to the second floor, so getting it up the stairs may prove to be more trouble than it’s worth.
We hope that things go back to normal in the coming year, and that Omicron doesn’t turn into Unicron by the end of January, but for this year, we’re hoping you’ll bear with us, make a few trades, enjoy the show, and let us know how we can improve things for next year.
We already know to include a Bring and Buy…
The Trading post is now open on our Discord Server, we’re not allowing sales posts on there, there are a number of other groups on the internet for that sort of thing, but anyone who buys something on one of those groups and wants to arrange to pick it up at Dragonmeet, please feel free to use that channel.
The Discord server can be found here
With the ongoing situation with new variants and masks coming back in for public transport, we’re sharing our thoughts on the Bring and Buy and the reason why we’re not implementing one at Dragonmeet, as well as what we’re doing to replace it for this year.
Bring and Buys are fantastic, there’s more chance of a bargain there than at most places in a convention, and you never known what you’re going to find. More than that, they’re an ideal place to offload all the kickstarters that you found you didn’t like after all, and most of the time, they also end up handing a good amount of cash to charity. All in all, there’s no lose to be had at a Bring and Buy.
Unless you’re a runner of conventions.
Here’s the thing about Bring and Buys, they’re busy, they’re always busy, and when you get to the size of convention of Dragonmeet, Airecon, and UK Games Expo, you have to have a computerised system in place to make sure you can log everything, paper just isn’t fast enough or reliable enough That’s the first issue.
The second issue is that you need lots of people manning them, to get the games booked in, to get the games processed, to get them on the system, then out on the shelves. At the end of the day, you need to have people around to collect up the games and process the cash outs for all those who came along. When we run the Bring and Buy at Dragonmeet, fully half our volunteers (often more) end up being put on the Bring and Buy because of the sheer volume of things being brought in. This year, many of our regular teams couldn’t make it, including the master of our Bring and Buy, Jason, and we just don’t have enough people to make it run the way it should.
But actually, neither of these is the reason we’re not having the Bring and Buy this year, that comes down to the third issue. Bring and Buys are busy, yes, but more than that, they’re frantic. As each new games comes out, there’s a scrum of people around them, and some people spend the entire day just hanging around the B&B just waiting for the possibility of bargains coming through. The problem with this is that the B&B inevitably becomes a scrum, the only place in the convention where normal rules of engagement are suspended and everyone is elbows in.
At a time like this, with things the way they are now, having something that has people diving in for bargains seems wrong, and for that reason and that reason alone, we’re suspending the bring and buy this year. It’s nothing to do with the massive backlog of unwanted kickstarters that are going to come to the first bring and buy that opens up, if things were different, we’d welcome that, the charities at the first convention that has a Bring and Buy will do very well out of that, but it’s just not the time to encourage a scrum of any sort, and that’s why we’re holding off.
What we are doing is setting up a trading post on our Discord server, where anyone attending Dragonmeet can post up what they’re looking to trade and arrange to meet up with others who are trading to swap games. At the convention, we’re putting aside the executive boardroom on the second floor for all trades to take place. There’s enough space for people to meet over the table, trade, and then enjoy the rest of the convention, but with one big difference to the Bring and Buy.
We’re not manning that room…
What this means is that you can’t bring your things and leave them in the room so that we’ll look after them, we don’t have the volunteers to manage that this year. If you want to bring a few games and spend some time in the room to see if others turn up wanting to trade, that’s fine, please be aware, if someone turns up at the front door with a container box on wheels, there’s only a small elevator to the second floor, so getting it up the stairs may prove to be more trouble than it’s worth.
We hope that things go back to normal in the coming year, and that Omicron doesn’t turn into Unicron by the end of January, but for this year, we’re hoping you’ll bear with us, make a few trades, enjoy the show, and let us know how we can improve things for next year.
We already know to include a Bring and Buy…
The Trading post is now open on our Discord Server, we’re not allowing sales posts on there, there are a number of other groups on the internet for that sort of thing, but anyone who buys something on one of those groups and wants to arrange to pick it up at Dragonmeet, please feel free to use that channel.
The Discord server can be found here