Saturday, October 08, 2005
First Day at the Poster Shop
Camron and I opened his poster shop this morning about 10:00. It's a simple design so we can focus on the purpose, the product, and the customer (his thoughts, my words). First of all he has decided to give half of what he makes to hurricane victims, the big half. He is only going to keep the little half. Second, he is going to create posters and teach poster making. And third, he wants to be the supplier for all the poster needs in this town, and maybe in the world. If I had lost interest during the night, he got me again with the mission statement. Anyway we carried his table fairly close to the road, tacked his sign to a nearby utility pole, and the store was open. He told me that as soon as the customers started showing up there would probably be a lot of them, so he would show them the posters and I could put the money in the money canister. Then we waited. After 10 minutes he decided that he drew the arrow on the sign the wrong direction. I pointed out that there was no traffic to see the arrow and he countered with, "if we had opened earlier we wouldn't have missed the college kid from down the road". (The young man might be in the 9th grade). We moved the sign a couple of times and watched the road closely, but still no cars. We waited for over an hour and the only vehicle that came by was a pickup pulling a horse trailer going about 90 mph. He realized our major problem right then. We needed a way to stop traffic when it did come by. He thought that traffic cones might work, or a bunch of people standing in the road. We discussed the why and why not of those for a while then he decided to try door to door sales. We only made it to one door, but by 11:30 he had made $3.00 and was ready to close shop until tomorrow. He is going to spend the evening making holiday posters because the single customer didn't buy a bat poster or even a bobble head bird poster. She was all in to Halloween and Christmas.