Also notable is the dealers that are absent. Due to the ongoing war, none of the Russians can come to the US, so they are a no-show. Similarly, covid restrictions in China have kept most of their dealers at home as well. So the dealer mix tilts heavily toward those from the US, Latin America, Morocco and India - and even a bit material from Greenland  is starting to show up on the European side of things.

I also saw one Chinese woman at a Crowne Plaza booth selling minerals from her home country (the other Chinese mineral dealers seemed to using Americans to staff their booths). She stood out as being one of the only masked people at the show, and for good reason. If she were to contract covid while in the US, it could be difficult for her to get back into China, due to their strict policies.

Hopefully by next year all these problems will be behind us.

The Crowne Plaza show was very busy on the first opening morning on the wholesale side, where folks literally mobbed some of the vendors like Midwest Minerals. It looked like the Macy's sale on the day after Thanksgiving. This was largely because they did not do any Thursday pre-sales this year. Once that abated, the pace out there was far more sedate. By contrast, with its broad advertising campaign, the NWC complex attracted a huge number of walk-ins from the general public on a rainy weekend, including lots of children, most of whom quickly tripped out on all the shiny things in the healing crystal and lapidary booths. I had to go a very long way to get parking on Saturday, even in the huge (but free) Coliseum lot south of the freeway. The downtown show at the Convention Center is going to have a hard time competing with this going forward, since the families that used to go to the main show when it was at the Merchandise Mart now all come to the NWC shows instead. I did not check out the Just Minerals show, but might do so today.