Monterey Custom House Plaza swamped with 35,000 people

Oct 11. Monterey, CA. I wish that was the title for this. Figures submitted to Craftmaster News for Monterey's Columbus Day Festival showed crowds supposed to be 35,000 in number. Well....I guess we have more people missing in action. There were quite a number of vendors at the event, but I don't think we had much more than 3,000 people visiting the show.

I've been doing events here for 14 years now and this is the absolute worst that I have ever seen. The promoter's did pretty good. They filled the place up with vendors (however, way too much jewelry) and had a decent number of food vendors and entertainment. Setting up wasn't too difficult, if you came early, but as time passes on, it does become congested.

Weather forecasts called for temps in the 60's and very strong winds sustaining speeds of 30 mph. However, we were pretty much spared the wrath of the winds. During the morning, the Parks Dept (of the Historical Park area) came to each booth to ensure that everybody was weighed down adequately. This is the first time I ever saw them do this and I wonder if previous winds at shows here have uplifted very many booths and they are very cautious.

So, crowds were low as compared to previous shows here and they just were not buying, having been even more scared off by events in the Stock Market this past week and many of them probably lost a lot of money as a result, making these shows more difficult than they already were. Sales were very low for pretty much everybody and the booths that had larger crowds surrounding them were merely engulfed by looky-loos.
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