I was telling George the other day that the more we vend, the better we are getting at doing our specific jobs associated with JamBusters! He has an important online job he takes care of and I handle the kitchen details. On vending days we work together on separate tasks in order to make the event work for us. He jokingly referred to it as ‘The JamBusters! Trinity” as I see three very different parts to what becomes the final product when we are on site vending. Today was no exception as we continue to fine tune it.
The Sunday market runs from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM which meant we were up at 5:00 AM to get ready, finish loading the car (George had part of it ready last night), and then driving the 70-minutes to the parking lot at the OK Falls Hotel & Restaurant. We got there this morning at 7:50 AM and had everything out on display by 8:30 AM. People were already checking the market out at least 20-minutes before we were ready which indicated there was interest right from the start. It made for an encouraging morning.
This season we have relocated where our booth/tent is set up. We are three vendors away from the main street and up against the side of the outdoor patio. We wanted to be closer to the main building for shading although we have a 10 by 10 canopy. The light overcast skies never gave us much of an opportunity to see whether or not our move was the right one, but we are happy where we are regardless. It was great to be back vending in a place where we did rather well last year and made some great friends.
There was an interesting mixture of vendors this time around and hopefully most of them will stay on for the entire season. We are still inserting extra dates where we can around our committed Sundays simply because we truly enjoy being out and meeting people. I have said many times over that I probably get as much out of the social part of vending as I do when someone tries one of my specialty items for the first time and gives me incredible feedback. We had a lot of that happen to us today.
It took us about 45-minutes to tear down and I know George will trim some time off of that once he gets back into the regular weekly routine. We are already making changes to how we record and keep track of inventory and are discovering several new shortcuts to speed up a few things we do. I guess you could say that we are getting a little more serious about what we do when we are vending JamBusters! Last year at this time we were still fitting vending into the newspaper schedule. This year that is no longer part of our lives.
I think that as a result, JamBusters! is starting to evolve into something else now that our lives have virtually completed the transitional phase we were going through. This year we can focus on vending and I’ve noticed that I have a lot more energy to see this through. In fact, I’m finding myself able to do a lot more now than I could and that has given me more mobility in the kitchen and is partly why we’ve added more new items to our inventory. We are evolving along with JamBusters! and I’m liking where it is taking us.