NRF retail conference follows CES lead with an in-person show

The National Retail Federation’s NRF 2022 conference opens Sunday at the Javits Center in New York City. “Retail’s Big Show” is the second major industry conference of the year after the CES consumer technology trade show in Las Vegas, which ran Jan. 5-7.
But NRF 2022 is facing much less resistance from exhibitors and the press than CES 2022 experienced for holding a show during the Covid-19 pandemic.
By all accounts the omicron variant of Covid is still raging. So why is there less outcry over the NRF show taking place in person?
For starters, CES has many haters in the press corps, who would love to see the show go away. They don’t like covering the massive conference, which takes place inconveniently right after the Christmas and New Year’s holiday break. These malcontents were the cheerleaders behind calls on social media to cancel CES 2022.
Also, NRF 2022, which runs Jan. 16-18, is a smaller show and is focused on the U.S. The last in-person NRF show in 2020 drew some 40,000 people.
This year’s international CES show attracted over 45,000 attendees amid the omicron scare. The previous in-person CES in 2020 attracted 171,000 attendees.
Both CES and NRF canceled their in-person conferences in 2021 because of the pandemic.
But now the conference industry and its participants want to get back to business.
However, NRF 2022 is likely to draw a much smaller crowd than in the before times. Organizers are estimating up to 15,000 attendees for this year’s show.
Also, several major exhibitors have backed out of the in-person NRF show. They include Aptos, Blue Yonder, Jesta, Manhattan Associates, Oracle, SAP, SAS and Unity Software.
“As we move from pandemic to endemic — a new environment in which we say life can and should go on — there’s going to be friction as we adjust,” NRF Chief Executive Matthew Shay said in a blog post on LinkedIn. “This year’s show is a step forward, and we believe it’s a necessary and meaningful one.”
While some groups are pressing forward with in-person events, others are still skittish.
The National Association of Television Program Executives canceled its NATPE Miami 2022 conference, which had been scheduled for Jan. 18-20 in Miami.
RSA Conference, a cybersecurity event, postponed its 2022 show from Feb. 7-10 to June 6-9. The physical event will remain at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
The Toy Association canceled its annual Toy Fair New York trade show, which had been scheduled to take place Feb. 19-22 at the Javits Center. Some of the biggest attendees, including Hasbro, MGA Entertainment, Walmart and Target, had bowed out, the New York Post reported.
Video game conference E3 canceled its show set for June in Los Angeles, citing the Covid pandemic. However, Mike Futter, an analyst at F-Squared, said the demise of this year’s show was months in the making and likely driven by a lack of support from game publishers, Bloomberg reported.

Photo: NRF 2020 in New York City (NRF)