Puerto Rican Festival, Springfield, MA
Sunday, August 6th, 2006OK, we were getting cocky. This stuff sells itself, right? Steve learns of an ethnic festival that happens every year in Springfield. Since he knows everybody at the town hall, he gets to schmooze with the person setting it up. The deal was: pay upfront and get a good spot at the Puerto Rican Festival. It’s a 3 day event with music and perhaps a couple thousand people each day. How much? $250 a day. (Quick! Do the math: 2,000 people x $4 a bag = WOO HOO!) The guy runnin’ the festival tells us that they’ll love our product! Can’t lose.
This is gotta work, right? We maybe have a couple hundred people at the farmers market each day and easily sell 125 bags. Who doesn’t like kettle corn? One slight problem: we need $750 upfront. We haven’t saved that much yet. My bank account is kinda slim after buying the tent and trailer. Steve has it in his bank account, so no problem. (Hell, we’ll make that back in the first day, we tell his wife to just think of it as a temporary loan.)
They supply us with a large tent pretty close to the stage. (This is good, right? The crowd will be RIGHT HERE. Funny that the other vendors grabbed all the spots way over there.) Off we go. We pop up our first batch…let’s get ready to start grabbing the money. Look at all these people here!
Nada.
Here’s how it’s supposed to work: you put your hand out, we give you a sample, you eat it, you give us $4. They were waving off the free samples! How do you NOT take free stuff?!? JUST EAT IT!! We were totally perplexed. We popped maybe half a 50lb. bag that night. We couldn’t GIVE the stuff away! We start to drop our prices: $6….$5….$4…$3. Barely any sales. The next morning Steve tracks down the guy and asks what’s going on. Nobody wants to even try the stuff. The guy says something to the effect that it might be a cultural thing, they don’t like taking free stuff, it might feel like it puts an obligation on them. Steve makes a joke that it’s like selling fried plantains at the Irish day parade.
Oh crap. We’re screwed. Time for drastic action. We noticed that since we’re so close to the stage, the crowd doesn’t really turn over that much. We end up with a packed bunch of humanity in front of us. Nobody could get to us even if they wanted some kettle corn. We pull our banner down and slap it onto another table and set it up behind the crowd towards the exits and other amusements. 2 bucks a bag. I continue to pop and sell it for 2 bags at the tent. We’re now double teaming. We break even plus make up for last night.
The next day the same thing. Steve is relentlessly giving the stuff away. We break even again. *Whew* Steve gets his “loan” back. We basically killed ourselves for 3 whole days and made nothing. At least we didn’t lose any money. Wow. There’s more to this kettle corn “scam” than I thought. We can’t wait until next Tuesday when we can go back to the farmers market.
