Results from our survey about new store hours/days part 4

And our last customer comment that we will highlight.

Wish you had produce for one stop shop.

This is one that is interesting. This past year we dabbled in some produce in the store. We brought in mushrooms from a great local mushroom farmer right down in Willow Springs. We ended up feeding most of them to the pigs. I know not everyone likes mushrooms. Heck, even Spork, who eats just about everything doesn’t eat mushrooms. But these were beautiful mushrooms that tasted great. The price was good and nobody bought them. After a few weeks, they were no good anymore.

I don’t think with our hours and our days open, we are the kind of place that can carry produce. Produce has to turn daily as it’s shelf life is VERY limited. That’s why the produce guy is always roaming around restocking and removing stuff from the produce section in the grocery store. What I think instead is we need to partner with a local CSA. If your CSA drop was at Ninja Cow Farm, you could swing by and get your box of produce, and grab some meat while you are here. It would be a one stop shop for you. We’d have produce move in, and produce move out so it would work well for us. Maybe we could bring in a bit extra for the weekend for last minute items, I don’t know. But I just don’t see us being a produce stand based on experience and how we run our operation.

Does anyone have a CSA they recommend I contact? Somebody they already love dealing with?

The rest of the comments that we received were all very positive and made me feel really good. I love getting feedback that what we are doing helps people, that our kids do a good job, etc. I’m not highlighting those comments because it feels self serving but to all you kind people who left wonderful comments, thank you!

Now we are back to the purpose of this survey. What days and hours should we be open. Except for one ambitious soul who thought we should be Wal-Mart, the majority of customers thought our existing days were fine. But there is a reasonable amount of people who think that adding Monday in makes sense. As do I. When I created this survey, I thought adding Monday to the week was a good idea. Then you can pretty much come today or tomorrow any time of the week. Of course there will be people that forget and come on Tuesday but at least we’ll have reasonable time frames to shop. So if we are going to expand the days, it looks like Monday is the day. However…

Since I was asking about days of the week, and remember I’d already figured that Monday was the day to add, I thought I’ll ask about hours as well. In retrospect, I should have thought this question out a bit more. It was kind of a throwaway question about hours. The top two choices were, your current hours are fine, and noon to 7pm would be better. Third in popularity was 10am to 7pm with 8am – 5pm coming in last of the ones with any volume of response.

So, noon to 7pm is the number one choice, barely over our normal hours are fine. Noon to 7 was a terrible choice of an answer. Is coming at noon what is attractive? Or is coming at 7pm what is attractive? I don’t know, which one helps the customers more? Like I said, this was a bit of a throwaway question and I messed it up by not asking the question better. Let’s handle the last question and then we’ll go to conclusions. 

Our last question was do you care who you meet when you walk in the store? Some people like to come on Saturdays and see the girls and maybe get a home made cookie. At least one person likes to see Lucy when they come. But the majority either don’t care, or don’t care as long as they know what they are doing. Good, that makes hiring another person easier since you are ok with whoever takes care of you, as long as they take care of you properly.