Flashback to Farmers & Furries…

Look what popped up on my Facebook timeline this morning as a memory from 4 years ago… I was in Denver that week for meetings with ag retailers from across North America. We had a couple of hundred attendees staying at the Sheraton in downtown Denver for this meeting. We had spent weeks planning everything out from the meeting schedule to the catering menu. Something we could not have anticipated while we were getting our slide decks and printouts ready was that we weren’t going to be the only group meeting that week at the downtown Denver Sheraton Conference & Event Center…

I can remember sitting in a room with a couple other members of our team having a discussion when someone in the room said under their breath…. “what the heck…” (except that’s not exactly the words they said). I can remember vividly looking out the huge glass wall at the back of our meeting room to see about 30 or so people in rabbit and fox costumes slowly making their way up the escalators to our meting floor. They were having a blast just waving at everyone and living their best lives. It was awesome.

Someone walked into the room and said that they front desk said that it was “den-fur”, and annual event they have at the hotel and that there would be about 3 to 4 thousand people in attendance that week. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud as I remembered we had a couple hundred guys and gals from the ag industry with us, many who have traveled hundreds of miles away from small town America and probably were just as clueless as I was about why these people were walking around in fox and rabbit costumes.

Let’s be honest, you probably couldn’t find two groups of people that were any different than what we had on our hands at the moment. When you combine this with the fact that with any out of town meeting like this there’s always the possibility of a handful of your people throwing back one too many drinks and wandering off the reservation, the danger is always there… well, multiply that risk by the fact that there are literally dozens of marijuana dispensaries in the vicinity that had just became legal. With all of this in mind, I knew this week had the potential to be absolutely wild… and it was.

I won’t go into a lot of detail and share any specific stories, there are just too many, but I will say that we didn’t have a single incident all week long and out of the hundreds of meetings I’ve attended throughout my career, this is one that everyone still talks about to this day.