Mayor Daley and Madigan destroyed Chicago Trade Show Business. 61 employees are terminated today! Boat Show Sunk!

Today about 61 employees from the McPier authority had a going away party; another twenty five should have their own going away party next week. A total of one hundred are slated for the chopping block due to greed and mismanagement. No more public pensions and now it is 401 K for the new hires. When I read the newspapers, they report how Daley and Quinn are going to fix the problem. These are the fools that have destroyed our convention business with incompetent personal incapable of realizing there is a problem and are too scared to fix the problem. This is how management in Chicago works, you have people in charge that come to work to play on the computer, if you make a decision, jealous supervisors undo any improvements. The only qualifications you need in Chicago for management positions is an ability to tell the next lackey above you what a great job they are doing. Get a picture of a young Daley on your desk if you really want to impress. I hope you enjoy the fruits of this work ethic, this is a picture I took at McCormick Place today. The Chicago Boat and RV show was a yawner if I ever saw one. The boat show yesterday was really bad, Wednesday was worse, and today was a disgrace. I talked with many vendors and they told me they are going to the smaller surrounding shows to sell next time. This Chicago Boat show is less than one third of prior shows. There was a lack of carpeting, just some red carpet in the aisles. The vendors looked shell shocked at the lack of business. Many people are sick of the nineteen dollar parking fee as soon as they arrive. You are out of twenty dollars before you turn you car off! When I went inside you can feel the unhappiness of the employees. Most of the employees work for private companies and really do not care what goes on. Most of the workers are black folks that look unhappy, just rock kicking to collect a check. Each bathroom had two persons cleaning and I watched one guy with rubber gloves wiping the urinal lip with toilet paper, his mind on other things. The bathrooms were the same old tile from decades ago and the expansion joints were very dirty, even the McDonalds had dirty wallpaper. The pizza from Connie’s was dry due to the lack of customers, but the service was excellent. The McDonald’s express did not have the fine line of coffee I really like. Much of the boat show was sales of things that had nothing to do with boating, cheap knife sets, pots and pans for cooking healthy. The pots and pan guy reminded me of a sham wow commercial! If the attendance of the boat show is any indicator of the health of Chicago, we are all in trouble. I took many pictures and they were all very depressing. I think the thing that bothered me the most was the lack of elegance or class McCormick Place has. I guess when you have idiots making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing nothing and a bunch of no-cares making minimum wage, you have a receipe for disaster. I would really look at the contractors and investigate the markup they get on these workers making minimum wage. I would also reduce the pay of the trades’ people to twenty dollars an hour and fire their union representation. Privatization may be good for Mayor Daley and his family finances, but it is hell for everyone else in Chicago. I was told changes are on the way for McCormick Place, but Daley threw the baby out with the bath water. There are many ways to improve McCormick Place, but change starts at the top, I think this gig is up for quite some time to come. Make sure you book all of your conventions outside Chicago until Daley is gone, you cannot make a silk purse out of a cows ear! Photo by Patrick McDonough taken January 15, 2010