Gallery: It Takes a Mountain of Shipping Crates to Make a Trade Show
01consumer-electronics-show-pause
The Consumer Electronics Show 2011 featured 2,700 exhibitors across 1.5 million square feet of sprawling space. At times, the sheer size of the show, the crowds, and the smells made for a grueling slog that could leave you exhausted and spent. But there’s more to this annual cavalcade of gadgets than 140,000 sweaty nerds all looking for the next best iPhone case.
02behind-the-las-vegas-convention-center
Nestled behind the Las Vegas Convention Center and the Country Club Towers is trade show no-man’s land, serving both as a storage and staging space for exhibitors and a backdoor shortcut between the North and South halls. If you were too tired to walk, golf carts could shuttle you from door to door here.
03outside-las-vegas-largest-trade-show
Attendees can escape the elbow-to-elbow media overload and get some fresh air, while contemplating the sheer magnitude of Las Vegas’ largest trade show.
04load-in-load-out-for-ces
It takes weeks of preparation to set up the thousands of exhibits inside the convention center, and about a week to break them down. By the end of the week after CES, everything will be shipped out, leaving empty space for another trade show in the same convention center.
05ces-coffee-break
If you were a coffee drinker, you would have indulged in one of the 14,000 cups of java sold during CES. And possibly you juggled that coffee while tweeting about the 80-plus tablets announced at the show.
06ces-shipping-pallets
Thirteen miles of convention-hall carpet will be rolled up and countless wooden pallets will be loaded up and shipped out. In Las Vegas, a forklift operator makes about $10 an hour.
07ces-tweet-space
If you were tweeting about what you saw, you might have had difficulty being noticed among the more than 158,000 CES-related tweets were sent out that week. On top of that, your iPhone probably didn’t work, given how overloaded AT&T's cell towers were. Among the crowd were 30,000 international attendees, all of whom were most likely using GSM phones, adding to the strain on AT&T's GSM network.
08ces-security-guard
On your way out the door in an attempt to grab a cell signal, you could have run into one of the many retired cops working as CES security guards. Former Wired.com writer Alexis Madrigal profiled two of the top CES cops in a story called "[The Crimefighters of the Consumer Electronics Show."](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/01/the-crimefighters-of-the-consumer-electronics-show/69133/)
09ces-attendees-behind-the-lvcc
Even if you have no cell service, the fresh air behind the LVCC could lead you into an interesting encounters — like the two brothers we met here. John L. Winston (left) and Francis A. Winston, of Oxford, North Carolina, have been in the electronics-importing business since 1980. When we spoke, they seemed quite at home relaxing among the stacks of crates, pallets and tractor trailers. "This is my 30th CES," said John, making the Wired reporter interviewing him feel like a total n00b. In his first years attending CES, John said the trade show was all about making deals with Japanese manufacturers. Then the action shifted to Taiwan, China and, lately, to Korea.
10ces-pallets
Median income for families in Las Vegas for 2010 was $53,000. And, while the convention business is an important one, the city's biggest employers are the casinos. The Nevada Gaming Commission reports $10.392 billion in revenue from gambling in Nevada last year. That leaves a lot of money left over for the city to use in removing the 122 tons of waste generated by CES each year.
11moving-people-behind-the-scenes-at-ces
Though gambling is big business in Nevada, it pales in comparison with the amount of money spent on consumer electronics, which in 2010 exceeded $174 billion dollars in the United States. It's no wonder that exhibition-planning company Global Experience Specialists put more than 130,000 hours of work into CES, and that tech reporters from all over the world flock to Las Vegas for the largest consumer-technology trade show in the world.
