Hey man…let’s do some drugs
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008It’s the third day of the season in Springfield and the sale are still holding up! Even though the weather was kinda iffy we still went through 7 1/2 corn oil jugs. This would’ve been a very fine day anytime last year, but it’s only the beginning of this season. As mentioned previously, we’re still missing a bunch of of the vegetable vendors and they’ll show up once something has had time to grow out of the ground. At this rate, we should get a record day sometime in July.
I still find it fascinating monitoring the drug habits of our patrons. (Oh, did I say DRUG habit? I meant kettle corn buying habits.) Above is a typical view of the farmers market this time of the year. It’s not exactly swarming with people.
Now here’s a view of our tent around 4:30 pm. This was our “big rush” around that time. You wouldn’t notice from just driving by, but it’s the steady stream of just one person buying a bag, then someone else appearing 3 minutes later wanting the same. You do this for 5 hours straight and that’s how we end up going through 7 jugs of oil. A small farmers market usually wants $20 a day for us to be there. Many craft festivals easily want $200 out of you before you sell one kernel. I guess the trick is to build up a following of loyal customers who want their fix. Apparently this is how real drug dealers get caught selling out of their homes. There’s never a crowd, but a steady stream of cars coming by all the time. At some point the neighbors notice what’s going on and call the cops. What’s nice about our biz is we sell our “drugs” to the cops.
Another thing that surprised me was the web stats on this website. You people have been visiting this stupid blog big time! As you’ll notice on the chart for April of this year, the blog page gets over 3,500 views, way more than the “buy kettle corn” or the main index page. My main purpose of this blog was to just generate crap about kettle corn so Google would rank our webpage higher in it’s rankings if you searched for “kettle corn”. I mean…c’mon, it’s about a guy in a tent hocking “drugs”.
The Framingham Farmers market will be starting back up in June, so I’ll be yammering on about that. I’ve got an idea to help market ourselves and hopefully we can bring those numbers up to what we’re doing in Springfield. Oh yea, and we’ve started to sell kettle corn online again. Within 24 hours of setting up the webpage, we had 2 orders. I think they were customers who had bought a bag online in the past. Let’s see how online sales pan out this year.
