People keep saying we need to mail badges, but even that needs volunteers! Let's say next year AC has 18,000 attendees. If 14,000 of those badges are mailed out, it would take a massive team to prepare all the envelopes! This team would need to start about two months in advance. Where would this get done? AC would need to coordinate these additional volunteers to meet, probably in a rented warehouse somewhere, for a few days to handle all that work. Let's say it costs $7 per attendee to mail a badge, plus warehouse rental fees of $900 and $400 for food to feed the volunteers. That would be over $98,000 in additional expenses for the con. Not to mention, the team of volunteers would need to travel to this location to prepare the mail-out badges. Even if mailing out badges went smoothly, they would still need to do ID checks at the con for those 14,000 mailed-in badges plus the other 4,000 people who registered past the mail-in date. It just makes more sense to do badges at the con. The con can have a big team arrive many days in advance and use the convention center as a place to prepare all the badge packets for everyone. What cons really need is more volunteers. Mailing badges will not help in the ways people think it will.