sagiter wrote:Trever,
While the smoking portion is certainly silly at best I find that two other points irk me almost if not equally. First is this hiding your head in the sand concerning the internet business. I mean let's face it, the internet is not going away any time soon and not facing it's inevitable effects on our day to day lives and hobbies is absolutely absurd. N ext this lack of collectors is patently ridiculous because without collectors where would any of us in this business be ? I'm interested in reading the responses on the French newsgroup concerning any of this although I don't think the majority will care a twaddle. I had a running dialogue with our mutiual friend Erwin VH concerning the utter lack of concern of these pipe colllectors that the Chicago show even existed let alone was approaching rapidly.
I had a small hope of convincing my wife of attending with me (she speaks French while I like you dabble and don't do well at it at all). I figured for a reasonabl price i could ship one or two bags to Erwin or you, carry one each and pack one each so that I could at least finance the trip (I wouldn't hope for an actual profit ). Oh well c'est la vie !!
Neil
Regarding the internet... Well, I could vent at considerable length about that, but will refrain. Suffice to say that France is in a time warp, net-wise. When I arrived here three years ago, dial-up was commonplace and ADSL virtually nonexistent. Also, NOBODY had email addresses - I would often offer to exchange emails and usually just got blank stares. I've read some theories that slow internet take-up in France was a side-effect of the success of Minitel in the 80's and 90's, with folks reluctant to "try something new" when they already had Minitel, but who knows, really? In any event, the mentality continues - all artisans must have the goal to make 2000 cheap pipes a year, sell them to distributors, and have them filter out to B&M's. There is no other way to do business. Things have improved a good deal in only the three years I've lived here, but the sheer level of broad-scale net awareness and accessibility still hasn't caught up to where my part of rural NC was three years ago. When you're still trying to catch up with the south side of Davidson County, it says something.
It's frustrating on different levels. On the one hand, I get annoyed that the French pipe world is so inward-looking, but on the other hand there is the fact that they simply don't get exposed to anything else. This show is a classic example - when/if it happens, it will be a pipe show entirely populated by large French pipe factories, perhaps with factory-employed artisans in tow to represent "the pipemakers", and all anyone attending will see is that
* All pipes are factory-made by French companies, and should cost $85 or so
* All artisans are French, and employed by the big factories
* There are only four or five types of tobacco in the world (St. Claude, Clan, Amsterdammer, etc)
So.. it's hard to blame them for not seeming interested or even being aware of outside markets. The dangerous side is that this sort of "Ignore the rest of the world and make our own market" thinking has been tried many times, most recently by the USSR........
On the bright side, however, now you can just forget the show, fly over for the price of a plane ticket, and stay here and drink free Breton whiskey and wine every night .. AND get to see some exotic pipes and play in a pipe workshop