There’s a trick to the "graceful exit." It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or past importance.
― Ellen Goodman
Job losses in the event industry are staggering, with some estimates exceeding 95%.
But to mention the industry's downturn, or suggest that the happy days are over, is to invite exile.
The holdouts won't have it.
Although the industry's collapse may deserve a speed-record, collapses have happened before.
Whole swaths of the economy—industries that once employed tens of thousands—have been suddenly, and permanently, eradicated.
Some memorable examples of such now-extinct professions include:
- Badgers. Badgers were loud-mouthed middlemen who hawked farmers' goods at open-air markets. (The profession gave us our verb meaning "to harass.") Grocers made them obsolete overnight.
- Lamplighters. Lamplighters were driven out of business with the introduction of electrified street lights.
- Pinsetters. Pinsetters set pins in bowling alleys before the job one day was abruptly mechanized.
- Knocker-uppers. Knocker-uppers woke people, using a bamboo stick to rap on their customers' windows. The invention of the alarm clock doomed them.
- Leech collectors. Leech collectors supplied surgeons with blood-suckers before "bleeding" patients fell out of favor.
- Resurrectionists. These wily entrepreneurs—also known as "body snatchers"—supplied med-schools with corpses until the use of paupers' bodies was legalized.
- Computers. Computers—often women—crunched numbers all day, until calculators made their jobs obsolete.
- Lectors. Lectors sat before factory workers and read aloud from books—sometimes books banned by management—to keep the workers entertained. A union strike in the 1930s put them out of business.
- Ice cutters. These rugged specialists, who cut big blocks of ice from lakes and delivered them to homes, were frozen out by the electric refrigerator.
- Milkmen. Every housewife's friend, the milkman suffered the same sad fate as the ice cutter.
The disruption triggered by the pandemic is horrendous. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
But it makes me wonder, can possible good come from the collapse of the event business?
I can think of two benefits:
A cleaner planet. Long before the lockdown, critics of the industry proclaimed the practice of assembling thousands of businesspeople, year after year, to mingle with suppliers and sit through seminars was unsustainable. But event organizers shunned sustainability, because it would slice into their profits. Perhaps tomorrow's organizers, facing a new breed of attendee, will think differently about their carbon footprint.
Better wages. I was among the lonely souls promoting virtual events over a decade ago. (In 2011, with an equally avid partner, I produced a day-long workshop that featured five case studies of successful virtual events. Getting more than a couple dozen organizers to attend the workshop was like pulling teeth, and we discontinued it a year later.) I have long believed that, like Hollywood and IT folks, event professionals can earn better wages as virtual event producers. It's an exciting, emergent field—a veritable "wild west"—and promising territory for those willing to acquire the right skill-set.
