It’s going to be…
…another nice Saturday for E@RTC on May 24! We weren’t so sure this one was going to make it—sort of like how we felt when we went to your wedding—but the skies cleared up, and here we are, still talking about you on our upcoming Saturday morning while sipping a fruity mix of something. It should be a nice day to make some new friends and make fun of some old ones.
We got an email from someone at a restaurant asking us to promote their car show during the time of our show. That’s like asking Costco to promote Safeway. That goes against the spirit of our agreement with the mall. We get regular requests to do just that, but we will only promote stores at the mall as a part of our giving back to Redmond Town Center.
We love that there are driving destinations for car lovers, and we do support them and talk about destinations all the time. We love to support all automotive businesses, but we just can’t do it on our blog or it gets to be a bit overwhelming. We learned this in our first year of the blog, over dueling stores that hated each other. We couldn’t scrape that poop off our shoes for months.
This person who wrote us then tried to claim that the car show at their business wasn’t for profit, yet signed the email from the business itself. Yeah, sure, and I’m the pope’s gardener.
We wish we could promote every business out there, and we love to see a healthy car community, but it gets out of hand faster than that food buffet near the fat farm. There are some organizations—such as car clubs like Avants, which we’ve always supported even though they are a for-profit business, and LeMay, which is a 501(c)(3), among others—but we have to be careful or we get overwhelmed by people asking us to help organize their charity car shows. We wish we could do it all, but we don’t have enough arms and legs, and there isn’t a great community bulletin board out there outside of Facebook.
We turn away a lot of booth requests because that’s a big no-no with the mall. It would be like someone showing up at your yard party to sell insurance. It sort of kills the spirit of the event. We just want to have fun on a Saturday morning.
We’re happy to do a shout-out for other shows now and then, especially if they’re legit and they don’t compete with ours. Extra points if the show is right after ours with enough time to get there. Then our participants get two shows to attend, and everyone’s happy. In fact, that’s the best way to do an event because a lot of exotic owners love to go somewhere after E@RTC.
See you all on Saturday!