Raise a Glass

As a young professional and an aspiring oenophile, I’ve become accustomed to toasting a job well done. A celebratory sip of syrah is better than any pat on the back. But who would have guessed that a bottle of wine and a knack for negotiation would save the day at a disastrous consumer show in my hometown of Minneapolis?

A few years ago at a small regional trade show, I was overseeing an exhibit for a major national retailer that was a client of mine. The exhibit’s main attraction was a pair of the retailer’s new gift-card kiosks, vending machine-like contraptions placed in shopping malls around the country that allowed customers to purchase gift cards without actually visiting a retail store location.

To help familiarize customers with the new kiosks, my staffers were instructed to walk attendees through an actual gift-card purchase. The lure: For every $10 gift card they purchased, attendees received a free $5 gift card. According to the client’s instructions, the booth was expected to generate approximately 100 purchases each day of the two-day show.

In retrospect, I vividly recall my supervisor assuring me that this job would be a cakewalk compared to past projects. All I had to do was man the kiosks and sell as many gift cards as possible. But I was well aware of Murphy’s Law, and knew that when it comes to trade shows, nothing’s quite as simple as it seems.

The moment the show opened, it was obvious we had a crowd-inducing promotion on our hands, with hundreds of attendees flocking to the kiosks, some purchasing up to $500 in gift cards. Before long, show management insisted I create a proper queue using velvet-rope stanchions or they would shut us down. (Murphy’s first visit.) I made an immediate phone call to a local vendor who delivered adequate stanchions within a matter of hours.

Feeling confident, I surveyed the newly organized line of attendees and noticed things were moving slower than expected. It turned out the kiosks had not been tested for nonstop back-to-back purchases and were freezing up, shutting down, and, worst of all, running out of gift cards. (Murphy strikes again.) Fortunately, I had an on-site technician to replenish the kiosks’ stock of cards. Unfortunately, he had no idea how to correct the other malfunctions, and his dwindling inventory of gift cards was nowhere near the quantity we’d need to keep the kiosks functional for the duration of the show.

The technician called his company’s home office to troubleshoot our technical glitches, and I made a quick call to my client to arrange for the delivery of additional gift cards. That’s when Murphy really reared his ugly head.

As it turns out, the gift cards were stored in a vault with a time-released lock similar to bank vaults that can only be opened on certain days at certain times. Since it was Saturday morning and the time-released vault was sealed every Friday night, there was no way to access additional gift cards until Monday.

While my contact foraged for gift cards, she instructed me to enforce a limit of three gift cards per visitor. The increasingly annoyed attendees, who had been waiting in an unmoving line for up to three hours, were not pleased. A pre-show advertisement promoting the kiosks in a local paper included no mention of a limit (not even a “while supplies last” caveat), and attendees were bound and determined to get their free cards, even threatening to contact the Better Business Bureau if they didn’t get their way.

I was busy trying to calm the crowd when the on-site tech announced he had corrected the kiosks’ technical malfunction. Before long, the line began to move, attendees’ moods improved, and I almost forgot about our quickly vanishing stash of cards.

That’s about the time my contact called back with good news and bad news. The good news was that she located several boxes of gift cards, enough to get us through the second day of the show. The bad news was that they wouldn’t arrive until that evening via FedEx same-day delivery.

A few hours before the end of opening day, we ran out of gift cards as expected. While a majority of the attendees begrudgingly accepted our apologies, one irate man badgered my staffers and I until he finally left the booth, warning us all to watch our backs in the parking lot.

After closing up shop for the day and contacting security to escort my staffers to their cars, I hightailed it to the FedEx Kinkos location where the gift cards were supposed to arrive. But there was no sign of the package. Using the tracking number, the FedEx employee informed me that my contact must have accidentally addressed the gift cards to my apartment instead of the store, and a representative in the apartment office had signed for the delivery. (Murphy makes an encore appearance.)

Luckily for me, my apartment was less than an hour’s drive from the FedEx location. But luck only goes so far. The apartment office was most certainly closed, and wouldn’t open again until Monday morning. In a tearful moment of catharsis, I swallowed my pride and threw myself a brief pity party before heading to the liquor store with plans to drink my troubles away.

As I was sulking down the vodka aisle, I remembered the time I tried to negotiate with one of my apartment complex’s maintenance men to unlock the indoor pool for a late-night pool party. After much cajoling, I bribed him with a bottle of wine and swam ‘til the sun came up.

With that thought in mind, a light bulb over my head snapped on, and Murphy cowered in fear behind the Bacardi. I snatched a spendy bottle of port and headed home to see if my friendly neighborhood maintenance man could unlock the office and retrieve my delivery.

One should never underestimate the power of port. The maintenance man gladly retrieved my package in exchange for the wine, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Later that evening, the client called me to ask how things had gone. I calmly told her everything was just fine. She didn’t even know about the disaster — or so I thought. As it turned out, she had secret shoppers spying on me for part of the afternoon, witnessing the ordeal firsthand.

But instead of being upset, she respected me for the way I handled the day’s events. In fact, she handpicked me to oversee the company’s next exhibit at a show in New York, assured that there was nothing — not even Murphy himself — that could stop me from doing my job.

— Alan Landry, brand manager, TG Events, Minneapolis