Fruits + Veggies
Meat + Dairy
Preserves + Specialty Foods
Baking + Prepared Food
Hello Wonderful People!
Last week was a tough one in the customer service department.
As darkness fell on Wednesday evening, Ted Thorpe called to break the news that it was still snowing in Millgrove, and the row covers protecting his late fall greens were too frozen onto the ground for him to harvest. Not Ted’s fault that the weather turned out to be a few degrees colder than predicted (and by the way, this week’s weather is much milder, so Ted WILL HAVE GREENS!) but that meant we were short 100 orders of arugula and 37 orders of mizuna. That’s a lot of people not getting what they expected. We started calling and emailing customers to warn as many as we could.
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| Then we had a couple of very late vendors and had to make a tough decision: should we throw off the whole day’s delivery plans and wait, or send some orders out with products missing?
Next we discovered that we had a mixup in the cheese department: unexpected extras of some kinds and not enough of others. More emails… By this point we were fearful that many customers would be annoyed, but the responses we got were amazing! We had volunteers galore to swap cheeses, and many of you took the opportunity to send notes of encouragement. Here are a few excerpts: “Thanks for letting us know, and giving me a grin on an otherwise boring grey day.” “Just makes me all the more grateful for the harvest we have that’s surviving.” “…this market is a tiny bright spot in our current bleak, dark landscape”. “Please just apply this small credit to your operations. You do an amazing job and I’m thrilled that you were able to continue to support local farmers and entrepreneurs.” “Three cheers to another day at the market and thanks again Market Team! Best team in the city – with or without professional sports!” Thank you so much for making this such a rewarding job! I really have to share one more story from the week, in hopes of spreading some needed laughter. It’s about cabbages: At the end of the day on Thursday, we had one magnificent purple cabbage left. Later that night an email arrived from “AM”: Hey, applause for all your wonderful work! I was short a purple cabbage this week. If you can credit me the $8 forward that would be great! sorry to bother you about such a thing. Happy that the cabbage mystery was solved, I offered to deliver it the next day before noticing a second note: Scratch that. It had fallen out of the box and rolled into the yard and I think the dog might have taken it for a wander to the other side of the yard. The box wasn’t in great shape but everything else did fine. So I replied: “Oops, did not spot your second message until now. Did your box get left in a bad spot? The offer of the cabbage still stands. The cole slaw might be a bit sketchy if you use the one that has been rolling in the shrubbery,” and delivered the cabbage the next morning, leaving it in a bag hanging from the gate latch. Around noon I received a screen shot of a text from AM’s landlord: Hi, I don’t know if you’re home, but the dryer is working and also there’s a red cabbage that I didn’t know was on the door and the handle broke and it’s on the floor sorry”. There was also this note and photo from AM: “the cabbage is still huge but lost a few leaves that he ate after wearing.” |
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