Personally, I don't understand the philosophy behind something like this. If when I was in business selling corn snakes, an exclusive like this had been offered to me, I would NOT have been interested. Simply because a LOT of my business came from the other vendors at the shows who were selling the same snakes that I was, but would often come to my tables to buy when they sold some of their own and had money in their pocket to spend on some new blood or new lines that I had for sale. This was a substantial amount of my business at shows. Why in the world would I want to cut that source of revenue off and get a bunch of my customers pissed at me to boot?
For anyone to cut off that source of sales at a show is being pretty darn short sighted, in my opinion. Not to mention that any other vendors at the show who were blocked from selling competing animals would quite rightly be incensed enough to NEVER buy from that company attempting to be a monopoly at the show. Heck, do you think that if I had had to leave Connie's leopard geckos at home because of a situation like this that I would have even the slightest interest of buying leopard geckos from that sole source outfit that foisted this situation upon me? Not on your life! Not to mention that I certainly would never have stepped foot in that show again.
As for walk-ins, heck, the reason the public generally goes to shows is for the exposure to a lot of vendors selling animals at competing prices and for a wide variety of offerings. Who in the heck would want to drive an hour or more to a show that only had ONE vendor selling mice, ONE vendor selling corn snakes, ONE vendor selling ball pythons, etc., etc.... ? My guess is that walk in traffic will literally DIE pretty quickly once people start thinking that they are being railroaded into who they can buy from at such shows and the selection was being controlled by a single vendor's availability at that time. Who would want that?
So personally, I just think it's a real bad idea, in my opinion, and tend to think that any show promoter who feels that they have to engage in this sort of practice is not keeping the WHOLE picture firmly in mind about why people vend and attend their shows.
Honestly, hasn't this taken place before with another show promoter a while back? I can't remember who it was, but my guess is that it was someone who is no longer promoting reptile shows. Now I wonder how that happened?
