Fall Fest! And lessons in retail

Two weeks ago, the Elkton Fall Fest took place. We learned about it a little late, but we managed to sign up for it anyway. Since I have, shall we say, an unexpectedly large amount of free time lately, I've been baking bread. We'd also both been toying around with the idea of selling stuff at farmer's markets. So when we heard about the Fall Fest, we thought we'd give it a go.

The Fall Fest involves closing down two streets (ie, all of downtown Elkton); there are vendors of various kinds, and food trucks. But to really draw the crowds, the city of Elkton brings in its ace in the hole: the pretty baby contest (0-6 months, 6-12 months, and 1-3 years old divisions, boys and girls). A panel of dignitaries solemnly determined first, second, and third place as an emcee directed parents onto the stage with their little ones. As a side note: a handgun tattoo on your thigh with cutoff shorts looks badass when you're 18, not so much a couple years later when you're trying to have your little munchkin take the ribbon at a beauty contest. (The munchkin in question won anyway).

(Note: I did not take any pictures of this event)

And in case there were any people so hard-hearted as not to be moved by a pretty baby contest, there were DockDogs! This did not involve eating sausages by the water. Instead, a swimming pool, with a dock of sorts, was set up in a parking lot. The contestant dogs had to jump in the pool, fetch a baton at the other end of the pool, and swim back to return it to their owner. Everyone involved really had fun, especially the dogs.

Did you know they made swimsuits for dogs?

Not surprisingly, the Labrador Retrievers all did well, with one getting a time of under 6 seconds. But the best part of the contest for me was watching a mutt jump in, swim halfway to the baton, get confused, eventually make his way to the baton, take the baton, only to deposit the baton at the side of the pool and joyfully swim around in circles until his master could finally persuade him to leave.

In all this commotion L and I had our humble table of bread and cork crafts. We'd stayed up late the night before baking. Ultimately, we had ciabatta, baguettes, whole-wheat boules, foccaccia, bagels, italian loaf, and as a last-minute addition by L, cookies. L also had made earrings, fishing lures, and floating keychains using her near-infinite supply of wine corks.

Buy our bread! We had to wrap the bread and add ingredient labels to be able to sell it.

Did you know that cork comes from the bark of the cork oak, native to Portugal? While it is best known for sealing wine bottles, cork can also be used an excellent thermal insulator. 

What a bust that was. Over some nine hours we made twenty-seven dollars in sales. Half of that was in cookies, which we hadn't even planned to make. Three or four people asked if we had anything gluten-free. (We did not - I've never found a gluten-free bread or cookie that was at all tolerable, so why make a terrible version of something that's good?). A few more people, clutching sodas, refused to eat the bread samples we'd laid out because they were on a low-carb diet. Some senior citizens came by, nosed the yellow ciabatta samples we'd laid out, and asked what kind of cheese we had. We did sell a few loaves and bagels here and there.

The booth next to us did quite well throughout the day. The woman running it sold natural cleaning products, soaps, and honey, in elegant packaging; the booth looked like a small shop. She was kind enough to give us some advice:

- Use shelves to display your product, as customers won't notice your goods as much lying flat on a table

- Never lower your price. It suggests that your merchandise is, well, cheap.

- Make signs to say what you're selling, with the pricing (we just had a table with bread on it)

She actually lent us a shelf, which L used to display cork items. We immediately noticed more people coming to the table to check it out. Granted, nobody bought any cork items - we saw a lot of people inspect the crafts and then get a look on their face that said "hey, I have wine corks at home too". But we at least went from zero interest to some interest.

We also raised our prices back up to where we had them at the beginning of the day. The few people who wanted to buy bread didn't seem put off by paying a premium for it, and the lower price we'd had for a few hours certainly didn't spark interest in bread in people who weren't interested to begin with.

So, we didn't make money, but we learned some lessons. For me, it was not so much learning a few retail "tricks" as coming to the understanding that buyers are looking for an experience as well as the product. We'd have done better to spend most of our effort doing up our booth like a French bakery, with shelves of bread, and maybe with us wearing aprons. This consideration in itself is sad, since it means that people focus on a simulacrum of the bakery experience, on the idea of what a bakery should look like, rather than on the concrete items ("bread") produced. This explains the mystery of why we see gluten-free items in bakeries: it doesn't matter that gluten-free bread tastes terrible, because the taste is secondary to the experience of buying bread in a bakery. Though I suppose another way of looking at it is that people seek out bakeries because they like making eye contact with the baker, they like being taken care of and exchanging a few words with another human being; that bakeries are an oasis in a world too dreadfully sterile to bear thinking about. So the game is about building human connections. People love the baker more than they love the bread. And that thought brings me comfort and hope.