We call ourselves Marketplace, so part of our job is exploring how marketplaces work, in all their forms. David Brancaccio and the “Marketplace Morning Report” team are setting out to visit in-person places of commerce, in a world where so much buying and selling has gone remote and digital. None are financial markets in a formal sense, but all markets are financial markets in a way, right? The goal is to learn the right and the wrong moves with experts.

This week: “A Business Reporter Goes to the Rodeo.” Today, all of the retail at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.

At the NRG Center in Houston, there are live bovines roaming, and, sure, manure. A T-shirt for sale depicts five cows with the words: “Smells … of money.” The retail selling floor next to the livestock judging pasture is heavy-gauge: There’s cattle-handling hardware, 900-degree home pizza ovens and Western hats of felt from pelt. Joe Young sells hats and realigns the ones customers bring by.

“You want to have a little bit of dip in the front,” he explained “It’s kind of that ‘howdy, ma’am’ dip. If it’s flat, it could pick it up, just blow it right off the top of your head.”

David Brancaccio came to Joe’s booth at the rodeo, called Heads or Tails Hats, out of Haskell, Texas, equipped with his own wool Stetson, which never did come with an owner’s manual. So Young started to share some proper care tips.

“If you just were to throw it in the back seat, it’s not going to stay shaped very well,” he said. “So if you set it on your dash or in your passenger seat upside down, that would be the best way of keeping it so it holds its shape.”

We didn’t ask about his sales, but a rival vendor lets on that 300 hats a day fly off the shelves over there, with not even a sales pitch. Here, the reshaping is what they call in retail a “loss leader”: they don’t charge for the service, but it gets people over to this booth and buying things.

“It gets busy. All eight of these steamers, they’ll just be blowing with steam all day on a weekend especially,” Young said.

Now, Young’s key hat “trick if the trade” is the X factor. Literally. Hats come with a sort of rating on them: A 10X hat is plenty serviceable. But a 100X should be better armor against the elements.

“So like a 10X would probably be around about a 10% beaver quality,” Young said. “And 100X hat would be pure beaver.”

A 1,000X hat costs thousands and might have mink or chinchilla in the mix, with diamond accents. It’s maybe less for trail-riding and more for picking up Vocalist of the Year at the CMA Awards. But a 10X hat will get the job done.

“Still a good quality hat, it’s a $400 hat,” Young said. “They hold their shape well. I just wouldn’t go out in a torrential rainstorm.”

For a hat that’s more — maybe “vegan” is the right word — there’s Ginger Jo Sklavos’ booth, The Family Jewels of Texas. She’s got hats woven mainly of palm — all customized, none identical, featuring everything from turquoise to spiny oyster to coral and sterling silver conchos.

Sklavos’ trick of the trade is about the efficiency of what business geeks call “just-in-time inventory.” “I mean, if I didn’t go home and make hats in the morning and the night, we wouldn’t have any more left,” she said.

Back to cowhide at a business called Our Stuff, where Shanna Saunders is the proprietor. She’s selling easy chairs and sofas made in Levelland, Texas.

“That one’s a leather made out of Tiffany Blue with a cowhide on the side,” Saunders said.

This chair is priced at $3,500, which seems like a steal for real leather, American-made. But people actually buy big-ticket items here, versus just stopping at the one place to sit down on the selling floor?

Saunders explained that it costs $28,000 to rent her retail space for the duration of the rodeo. In other words, if she can afford that, it must make good economic sense to set up shop. She will break even, no doubt.

And she said it also doesn’t hurt that alcohol is for sale just around the corner, and other stands all over.

“People come in, they’ll go home and measure. Sometimes the sale comes afterward, but some people are drunk and put their credit card out,” Saunders said.

What’s on offer at the rodeo — from hats to furniture and more — is not the typical, theme-park-style, throw-away stuff. Several families I meet here tell me they’d bought their spiffy headgear at the rodeo years earlier, suggesting the merch is an investment that holds up. Among them is Daniel Clark and his mom. He started to describe his hat.

“It has red feathers two on the sides of the hat. And it kind of looks like a taco, but a bit smaller,” he said. “It didn’t fall apart because it’s good quality.”

Find all of our Tricks of the Trade stories here.