WHAT ABOUT TRADING?
This is a VERY IMPORTANT POINT, so pay attention, kids.
We DON’T allow trading on the Foundry premises. This is to accommodate two things:
- Foundry is still a shop in it’s own right. Given that we’re not being charged for the premises and the many benefits it offers us, we think it’s a little cheeky to transact directly in front of them, without allowing their due competitive advantage their premises should provide. If we were paying customers, the view might well be different, but we’re not – we’re guests of theirs and feel it entirely right to respect their commercial nature.
- We want to prevent people from attending just to trade. We’ve not seen this before, but as a pre-emptive move, we want to eliminate the possibility of people coming just to ‘set up shop’ and then shove off. Remember, BOYL is free – this drives a culture of kindness, generosity and general good-spiritedness you won’t see at any other wargaming event. That culture could be corrupted by wanton and unchecked opportunism by figure traders, so we’re putting it in check.
But hang on! I’m not an opportunistic evil figure trader – I just want to save some postage costs and see if I can get a figure or two!
Quite right, and we know that.
We (and Foundry) are very realistic about this and understand that people want to trade old lead, most of which is out of production anyway and so clearly not competitive to the Foundry product range. We get that. This is very much a spirit-of-the-law principle – of course you’re going to talk about trades and uhm-and-ah over figures you see on the tables that you wouldn’t mind getting your hands on.
This is a key part of Oldhammer. So a few figures here and there are fine. We couldn’t stop that even if we tried, so we won’t.
What we’re asking is that you don’t conduct the actual trade on site. Don’t leave a tray full of miniatures with a price and a contact name on a table somewhere. Don’t exchange the figures or cash on site. You can talk about the trade all you like during the event, but please conduct the actual transaction at the pub later.
We need to emphasise this point: Foundry do NOT charge us for the facility, which is why BOYL is free, which is what drives the culture of BOYL and makes it the event it is. Please do not jeopardise this position. It would be great to trade at BOYL, and we get that. But having a free and long-running BOYL is far more important (we think) than any benefit short term trades would bring you.
