First day the Wayland Farmers Market
Thursday, June 26th, 2008Springfield Farmers Market, June 24th
So weather.com said there will be thunderstorms in Springfield starting at 9 am, more at 12 noon, again at 3 pm and getting worse by 6 pm. OK fine, we’ll go anyways and sell some soggy kettle corn to the hardcore. I bring enough supplies to have a record day of sales during a typhoon.
We get there and setup. No rain, it’s a perfect day. Lines are starting to form every few minutes, Steve and I can’t even stop to get a bite to eat. I start hoping that it’ll rain so we can take a break. They continue to buy the stuff, I’m paddling like crazy to keep up.
We run out at 5 o’clock, an hour before closing. Not a drop of precipitation anywhere. We would’ve had a record day if I had brought more oil. (We ran through 9 jugs.) Now we’re seeing a lot of sad faces. Some kid even started to cry that he didn’t get this weeks kettle corn. God I hate weather.com.
Steve found this cartoon in the newspaper.
Wayland Farmers Market, June 25th
We had popped here last year on the last day of the market. Peg, the market manager was all psyched to have us back and hopefully be there this year. I had explained that I also had a corporate job where I sat in traffic for an hour and a half just to GET into Boston, stayed in a windowless basement room and edited insurance videos for 8 hours, then got back into traffic and sat there for another hour and a half just to get home. Thus, I couldn’t make kettle corn on EVERY Wednesday because I need to maintain my other income. She wanted to know what was wrong with me. She also had used a sign for our spot with read “Velma’s Wicked Good Kettle Corn”. I pointed out her error and she felt bad for the screw up, even though “wicked good” is correct improper Bostonian usage.
So this Farmers Market is about the same size as the Framingham one. It’s nestled right next to a busy street and is located in an upscale area. It’s associated with the Russells’ Garden center in Wayland, Massachusetts. I didn’t realize it at first, but there’s about 50 employees who work there, and once they started breathing in the kettle corn “fumes”, they all had to have a bag.
Eh…we did barely OK. (2 and a half jugs of oil) The Framingham Farmers market was like this before we got known in the area. I’m sure if we stuck with it, we could get a pretty loyal following for this area. Thing is, it would probably take a years worth of popping for it to really start to pay off. If I cross off Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays off my corporate schedule, I’ll have nothing to fall back on when winter comes.
Framingham Farmers Market, June 26th
Another grey and kind of rainy day. (I didn’t even bother to look at weather.com) The interesting news was last night we got 2 emails. Somebody from the Boston Globe wants to do a food story on us. Another person in San Francisco wants to do a another kettle corn story. I guess kettle corn is the latest trend in food. I thought it’s been a “trend” for the past 10 years.
The Boston Globe photographer showed up today and took a bunch of “snaps” of us doing our thing. I guess we’ll be speaking with the Globe reporter tomorrow. I should be speaking with the San Francisco reporter later tonight. I’ll definitely post the articles here once I get ‘em. Fox news was also here shooting some footage of one of the vegetable guys. I’m convinced there’s a big news agency somewhere that notifies all the other news outlets on June 25th that Farmers Market season started, thus, they should do something on it.
We did alright for a drizzly day. (almost 5 oils sold.) We’re getting solid customer feedback. Many people are now buying a couple of bags at a time. This is the same buying curve we experienced with Springfield when that started to pick up on us last year.
