Scenes from City Electric Supply’s Connect 2022 Event

At the entrance of the Connect 2022 trade show, the 2,000-plus attendees saw a CES counter area featuring an innovative virtual-realty twist to promote vendors' products and its own company history.

Jim Lucy

June 18, 2022

More than 2,000 City Electric Supply employees, vendors, independent reps and customers took part in one of the electrical industry’s biggest in-person events of the year — Connect 2022. Held at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Conference Center in Kissimmee, FL, the event included a trade show with more than 50 vendors, presentations by Thomas Hartland-Mackie, the company’s CEO and other company executives, and several lively networking events.

This year’s event gave attendees a chance to hear about its plans for the future. Mackie reportedly told attendees at one of the general sessions that he believes CES, which currently has more than 600 locations in North America and more than 1,000 locations worldwide, could one day have as many as 2,000 branches in the United States. While that sounds like an aggressive goal, CES has in some years opened as many as 50 new branches and is on track to open several dozen in 2022.

Check out the slide show above to learn more about this event.

About the Author

Jim Lucy

Editor-in-Chief of Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing

Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 40 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing newsletter, and as a contributing writer for EC&M magazine During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement.

Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted with his wife and three sons in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 30 years.