While it isn’t officially the end of summer in the Midwest, there is a rush to get all things “summer” done before Labor Day. Never mind that there are three more weeks of the actual season. Midwesterners have mistakenly accepted that we only deserve three months of bearable weather, not even one or two weeks more.

So that, combined with school starting up and the exodus of the college-aged work force from resort towns - leaving no one to run go-cart tracks and wait tables - means one last lap in proverbial summer pool.

“Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face,” was a phrase I heard my grandmother say from time to time. It’s not used too often these days but it literally means, don’t go ahead with an action that could make things worse for you farther down the road. This is especially true if the action is done as a quick reaction, out of anger or not thought through.

I wanted to say this to a long-time customer the other day. In 2015, they plan on pulling out of three of the major shows they do annually because, “the CFO doesn’t like the fact that material handling costs are as high as they are and are not something that can be predicted and budgeted for,” (sic).

I recently met with a new client who was just hired by her company, and one of her job functions is to handle their modest trade show program. She is new to the trade show world and was very open to any advice I could offer.

We talked for awhile about typical issues such as the advantages of shipping “advance” to the warehouse versus shipping “direct” to the show site, consolidating shipments to save on material handling, and the pros and cons of renting a monitor as compared to owning and shipping their own.