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There's plenty of vrrrrooom in Vegas

By David Perry -- Furniture Today, March 16, 2003

Las Vegas — "I've been to Vegas 20 times, and I've never seen THIS."

The guy had just arrived at the airport here late on a Saturday morning. After he collected his bags, he moved outside the teeming terminal and discovered a nasty surprise: a monstrous cab line.

Hundreds of new arrivals shuffled through the maze-like line, which snaked back and forth like a human accordion.

Sadly for me, I was right behind the guy who had never seen such a line in Vegas. Frankly, I hadn't either. It took me more than an hour to emerge from that line and finally grab a cab.

Boy, I thought, this Futon and Specialty Sleep Expo is really going to be a barnburner.

As I sped away from the airport, a billboard revealed the real cause of the Vegas crush: Yanni was kicking off his world tour in Las Vegas that very night.

Actually, that's a joke, although Yanni did draw an enthusiastic audience of thousands when he performed at Mandalay Bay that night.

And it wasn't the Futon Expo that drew those extra thousands of people who poured into Las Vegas on the first weekend in March, although the show's sponsors were pleased with attendance.

The big draw that weekend was NASCAR, which raced at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Newspaper reports said that some 140,000 fans attended the event. Cab drivers told me that's the second-biggest weekend in Las Vegas all year. Only New Year's Eve is bigger.

So did the futon and specialty sleep crowd get lost amidst the sea of NASCAR-jacketed fans?

Not really. The venues — the speedway for the race and the Las Vegas Convention Center for the futon show — were miles apart. The futon show hotels, the Sahara and Circus Circus, were in the neighborhood of the convention center, although the walk over was a lot longer than it looked.

Tom Tedesco, the Devon Chase executive who also is president of the Futon Assn. International, which owns and manages the Expo, admitted that it "was a hassle" to share the town with the NASCAR crowd. But he said that Las Vegas is such a popular destination that it's hard to find a calm weekend for a futon show.

"Vegas is a happening place," Tedesco said. "If you can find a weekend where nothing is happening here, something is wrong."

The main hassles were in making hotel accommodations, getting in the good restaurants, and catching a cab. Las Vegas has more than 120,000 hotel rooms, but the NASCAR crowd gobbled up many of them.

Las Vegas has always been a popular venue with the specialty sleep gang, going back to the old days when the waterbed show was held in Vegas each year. Nowadays the waterbed guys are part of the "specialty sleep" crowd, which is part of the Futon Expo.

The show's organizers have an every-other-year Las Vegas strategy. Last year the show was in Chicago. Next year it moves to Philadelphia, before returning to Las Vegas again in 2005.

The show this year was a sellout. "I'm very pleased with Las Vegas," Tedesco said on the final day of the show.

Exhibitors generally reacted to the busy race weekend with good cheer.

"We're a big draw too, aren't we?" asked Bob Naboicheck, president of Gold Bond.

"If we could get NASCAR to sponsor one of our latex pillows, we would be set," chuckled Rick Robinson, president of Nature's Rest.

"It was a little more difficult than usual getting reservations at the good restaurants," commented Larry Klein, director of sales for Natura. "But I don't think it frustrated anyone who came here. It added some excitement, seeing all those race fans. I never realized what a following NASCAR had."

Frankly, I didn't either.

And I think Rick Robinson is on the right track (no pun intended) about hooking up with NASCAR on a product-licensing venture. If all those fans were equally loyal to an official NASCAR futon, mattress and pillow, sales would race right along.

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