Monday, June 16, 2008

My achin' back...

Well, we're not dead.

We're not even injured!

In fact, we're fine. But we're exhausted. The WND team put in some loooooong days last week keeping the shop open and participating in this year's Riverbend festival. Yours truly put in at least 3 16-hour days back to back.

But we think it was worth it. The cost of participating was super cheap, so our overhead wasn't that debilitating. I must admit that sales were rather disappointing. I thought I did some really conservative estimating when projecting expected sales for the week, but I guess I wasn't conservative enough. It turns out that Riverbend goers don't want to shop -- they want to party! Duh. Between all the beer and music, but mostly beer, it seems folks just didn't have enough energy left over to come learn about fair trade and maybe pick up a thing or two. So that's a bummer. The good part is that we generated lots of interest in the shop, and got to talk to tons of people about where we are and what we're doing. So all in all, it was worth it just for the sake of advertising alone.

The kicker is that Jency and I jumped neck-deep into all the craziness the day after getting back from our honeymoon. It was a good test of our patience and ability to adapt as a newly married couple. But I'm so glad that we share the load, because it would have been doubly worse if only one of us worked this job -- not from a workload standpoint, but from a time together standpoint. At least we're able to still be with each other while we're busy.

Many thanks to the Jennings-Grishams for their help last weekend, and to our own Ryan for all his extra efforts and long hours.

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