Trade Show Swag

Vegas in May Travelog #5½
Back home - Wed, 24 May 2023, 5:30pm

As the trade show I supported this week was wrapping up I went on a swag run. "Swag" is the stuff vendors give away for free at their booth. The swag is both a come-on to entice you to stop by their booth to get scanned and learn about their products and a reminder to you in the days and weeks following the show about the company. Ideally the swag has the company's name and logo on it, and is in some way memorable, useful, and/or fun.

I'm by no means a swag hound. There are people who methodically visit every booth just looking for free stuff. Over the years I've worked trade shows I've seen people carrying multiple shopping bags full of swag. They're not interested in what any of the vendors do; they just want free stuff. And they're not even particular about what the free stuff is. If it's free, they take it. Curiously the biggest swag hounds have been late career government employees. Make of that what you will.

I describe swag hounds to contrast my approach to picking up swag. At some shows I take home nothing. At most I take a few items, but only things I think are useful or funny. My biggest haul in the past was at AWS re:Invent in 2019 when I took home a few water bottles, a deck of playing cards, a hoodie, and several t-shirts (to give to others). This show I found a surprising number of things for myself and/or Hawk:



Going clockwise from the top left:

• Alcohol sprays. We use rubbing alcohol hand wash regularly now— thanks, Covid— so small containers of it that fit in a pocket are useful. These are interesting because a) they've got little spray pumps and b) their flattish shape means they fit better in certain pockets than rounder bottles do.


• Reusable bottles. We use these almost daily. I take them when I travel to have water in the plane, in my hotel room, or at places like trade shows. Hawk uses them to take premixed beverages to the office as a healthier alternative to the sugary stuff in the company kitchen. I grabbed 3 because they were simple bottles with not-fidgety lids.


• A deck of playing cards. We play cards enough to wear out our decks.


• A reusable tote bag that zips into itself. We have a few of these already and leave them in the car and take them traveling so we can always have a bag available when we make an unexpected shopping trip. More are always useful— when they're good quality. This one is.


• A cookie. I ate a few of these myself over the course of 3 days. I brought one home for Hawk since they're mildly sweet sugar cookies (she loves sugar cookies) and not chocolate (she's allergic to chocolate).


• A tin of breath mints.


• Another tote bag that zips/folds into itself.


• Another reusable bottle. This one has a trick that it collapses and expands. It also looks kind of like a grenade. That will be charming until some paranoid TSA agent looks through my bag and freaks out.


• Head lamps. These are handy for when we're hiking in the dark. That happens occasionally on purpose, like when we're exploring caves or star-gazing. I grabbed one then went back for a second so Hawk and I can use them simultaneously.


• Hot sauce. Hot sauce is surprisingly becoming A Thing for trade show swag. Two vendors (out of probably only 30 at this show) had hot sauce as their swag. For one it's a play on their name. For the other... I dunno, maybe the head of marketing likes hot sauce? I took this particular one— well, these two bottles of it— because it's Cajun style hot sauce. The other was habanero, which despite it being trendy has a (lack of) flavor I dislike.

Update: There's one piece of swag I forgot because I tucked it in my other bag. It's a collapsible metal drinking straw. I grabbed it because I know Hawk likes reusable straws... but then I remembered she won't use metal ones because of the taste they impart. I don't take metal drink cups/bottles for the same reason— which is a shame because they're among the trendy swag things right now.

I Tried a Hard Seltzer. It's... Alco-pop.

Hard Seltzer is a new category of alcoholic drink that has emerged over the past several years. It's often associated with Millennials, the age group that have popularized it & to whom it is generally marketed. If you've heard Millennials talking about drink brands like White Claw, Topo Chico, and Truly— those are hard seltzers.

By the way, if you still think "Millennials" is a pejorative for "kids", you need to catch up with the times, Boomer. Millennials are people born between 1981 and 1996. Even youngest Millennials have been old enough to buy drinks legally for 5+ years now, let along the older Millennials who are now in their 40s. That's why the market has been shifting around their preferences for several years.

While I enjoy many kinds of alcohol drinks I've resisted trying hard seltzers. For me it's two things. One, hard seltzers tout lots of strong fruit and/or sour flavors. Those aren't my taste in drinks. Two, I am skeptical of "alternative" malt beverages from awful products that alcohol companies foisted on the public in my formative years— crummy wine coolers and the total commercial flop named Zima. Yes, I tried Zima. Once. In the early '90s. I've been reluctant to try anything like it ever since.

Just recently, though, I gave in and tried a hard seltzer. It was High Noon Pineapple Vodka & Soda.

Why'd I do that? Well, I wanted to use one of my coupons for a free drink on my Southwest flight yesterday. A couple years ago they had a really good beer, Fat Tire, but they discontinued it. They even discontinued the one decent beer they used to carry, Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy. After those my usual pick became Gin and Tonic, but now Southwest has discontinued even gin! So I decided to give this pineapple-vodka drink a try.

How did it taste? It tastes like a pineapple soda. It's like 1 part pineapple juice mixed with, say, 2 parts club soda or tonic water. I could imagine this being sold in non-alcoholic form as a refreshing fruit soda. But it's got 4.5% alcohol. Except the vodka it's spiked with is flavorless and almost impossible to detect. Basically the drink is alco-pop.

Would I drink it again? Not really. I mean, I might buy it aboard Southwest again— but that's mostly because their other choices are so weak. I don't care for fruit soda. I especially don't care for a boozy drink that tastes like a fruit soda. If I want something "light, refreshing, and fruit-flavored sweet", I'll drink an actually refreshing non-alcoholic drink. When I drink alcohol I want to appreciate the flavor of the alcohol, not have it completely hidden like someone's roofied my drink.

In My Mind it's Summer

It's not quite summer yet. Technically summer doesn't begin for another 4 weeks here in the Northern Hemisphere. Even the popular definition of summer in the US, kicking off on Memorial Day weekend, doesn't begin for another few days. And the weather around here sure doesn't resemble summer. With a forecast high today of 71 it's felt more like March than late May. But today I decided none of those have to stop me from adopting a summer mindset!



Today I restarted one of my summer habits of going out to the hot tub for dip mid-afternoon. On the way to it I stuck my feet in the swimming pool. The heater is on now in anticipation of reopening the pool this weekend. Already the pool water is a pleasant 83°. That's not quite warm enough on a cool-ish day like today though it will feel great when the weather finally catches up to the date.

As for the hot tub... yeah, that 103° water feels awesome even when the air's a tad too cool for the pool. Sitting in the hot water under bright sun, tanning my face and shoulders, made it feel like summer even though the temperature continues to say "March". 😎

Last Night in Grand Cayman: Beach, Hot Tub, and Dinner

Grand Cayman Travelog #24
Seven Mile Beach - Fri, 19 May 2023, 9pm

Tonight's our last night in Grand Cayman. We celebrated it by going out to a nice(r) restaurant. But first, after finishing up with our driving tour around the island this afternoon, we went out to the beach and the hot tub. Well, I went to the hot tub after the beach. Hawk was feeling a bit ill from wave motion while we were wading in ocean together and opted to go back to the room and lie down. She wasn't ill enough to need attention so I stayed out for another hour or so. After a while I joined her upstairs until she felt well enough to try dinner.

"Where shall we go for dinner?" is often an impossibly wide-open question. We decided quickly on Mexican food as the cuisine we wanted. That narrowed our choices substantially, to about 3 full-service restaurants. We picked Casa 43. It was a tad spendy for Mexican food but had chicken tortilla soup— which Hawk wanted because it helps settle her stomach.

We drove over to Casa 43 and couldn't find legal parking. We looked up and down the street twice. We bailed out to try another Mexican restaurant half a block away. It had tons of parking in its patrolled lot— not exactly a good sign! Still, we figured not dealing with crowds would be preferable to having the best food possible. Except once we looked inside Hawk wanted to nope out of there. We went back to Casa 43 and parked in a questionably legal spot on the street. Other people were doing it, too, so we figured there might be some safety in numbers.

I'm glad we chose to deal with the parking, the nearly full restaurants, and the somewhat spendy prices at Casa 43 because it was amazing. Hawk changed her mind from chicken soup when she saw that they had a fried avocado taco. She loves avocado, and fried avocado is something we've never seen before. She paired a grilled cauliflower taco along with it. We got a guacamole appetizer that tasted better than what we make at home— I was both impressed and slightly frustrated by that— and I got steak fajitas for dinner that 100% hit the spot... even if they were $30. The one thing I didn't do was order alcohol. Holy shit, beer was $12 and margaritas with quality liquor started at $23. Some spendiness is just too spendy for me.

On the way home we gassed up the car so we don't have to deal with it while driving to the airport in the morning. We also bought dessert from the gas station's well stocked convenience store. It was 1/4 the price of buying dessert at Casa 43. Now we're back at the room, enjoying our dessert. I'm finishing off my last beer from buying a six pack a the store earlier in the week. Yes, that's the 6-pack I bought for the price of one glass of beer at Casa 43. Don't get me wrong; I loved Casa 43 and I'm glad we went. It's just that tradeoffs are necessary vs. eye-watering prices.