As someone who has attended a lot of conferences over the past couple of decades where there are vendors present, I can say that commercial interests can indeed severely impact socialization at an event.
The worst I’ve seen is when vendors are not identified as such and sell in areas intermixed with the main event. In those cases, you are almost afraid of striking up a conversation with someone (or responding when approached) if you don’t know them because it eventually turns into a sales pitch.
The least impact on socialization that I have seen has been when vendors had a designated area or at least had to identify themselves somehow as a vendor (a ribbon on their name tag for example.) Then attendees had the option to go look at wares for sale or avoid it. They also knew to prepare for a possible sales pitch when someone with a vendor ribbon walked up and started talking to them.
Personally I wouldn’t go to a WGA event to buy things (except WGA items to help fund the group.) If there was a vendor area that was easy enough to stroll through, however, I probably would check it out just in case something caught my eye.
I also like the percent of gross sales fee idea. I’d hate to exclude someone selling $30 worth of bison tubes due to the need to pay a $25 fee. (I just bought a half dozen at the bonfire event out in the parking lot. In this case, the selling was separate from the main event area and nobody was being accosted as they passed by… I felt it was perfectly acceptable.)
