Frustrating. It's never good to have to take home so much especially after putting in the effort just to keep it alive during harsh weather and get it to market.

It sounds like you're doing just about all that you can as far as advertising. My only thought is that if the market happens every other week it seems to confuse people. I'm sure you've thought of this and it's hard to balance the pros and cons of being there every week.

If people are not even coming out the market before thanksgiving I'd think it's a sign that people in the area are just not all that committed to supporting their local farmers. How to go about changing this? I suppose that takes time and patience and a little educated coaxing now and again.

-Mark

Mark,

Thank you for understanding, you know how I feel. The market is every other week because our vendors don't have enough produce to supply a weekly market. The building is also not available every week. Also, we need a break. It is nice to have one of those every once and a while.

We are going to "Boost" our facebook posts for the next market. As we did a customer poll last year at a market and Facebook was the number one way customer said they heard about the market. I hope it helps.

Jay

maybe try a csa?

CSA's just are not popular around here. I think the idea of if the farm fails, then I am out money scares off too many people here in tornado, hail, drought and wind country. There was one of the bigger farms that started one, but it only lasted a few years. They went back to their farmers market and wholesale marketing methods.

I have an online CSA/Farmers Market that we do weekly deliveries to my hometown. I use to travel to the larger town that has the winter market, but my time constraints just don't allow me to do that anymore.

I guess we will just try to get more customers to the winter market and hope my online market customers order more.

Jay

We had market Saturday and it was slow. I banked on quite a bit of pie orders.
People want the stuff they just want it on their terms. They don't think about markets as a place to buy. They just go to the store.
I posted an ad on the local facebook sales page for pies and got tons of interest. When I said $11-13 I got very few orders. Bummed.

Today was our first day of winter market and it also was very slow and pathetic. This was a special Thanksgiving market. The Cilantro did sell out. Most customers have no idea the work that goes into producing vegetables during the winter. My conclusion is that people are just in a big hurry and would rather go to the grocery store where there is more selection. Hopefully it will pick up for all of us.

Well at least we all had a poor market before Thanksgiving. If it wouldn't have been for the last 10-15 customers, all with $12-$30 purchases, I would have been really sad. Next market, December 6th, then the 20th. I hope they are better!

Jay

How does your vendor count compare to summer? Ours is 1/3.

One thought is we are inside and not visible from the road. The building is nice, there is plenty of parking, heat and bathrooms.

Can you put one or two vendors out there as "bait", with brightly colored shade covers?

Can you hang a BIG banner on the building?

Market was extremely disappointing today. It was Santa day and generally that is well attended. I think it was a little bit less popular this year but the main problem was so many people not even glancing at the market booths. It seems to me there are 3 steps to sales:
1. getting customers into the building
2. getting customers to look at your stuff
3. getting customers to buy something

Maybe that sounds simple but it really isn't. Step 2 was a real problem today with the whole line of vendors. It wasn't that the families were in a hurry because many stayed to get free face painting. It was that they didn't even consider looking at our products. The face painting was very popular and she must have painted 40-50 kids. She told me she got $31 in tips! which she spent at market. I asked if she thought some was stolen and she was sure it wasn't. People were just too cheap to even tip a buck per child.

This market is usually better.
Knowing what kind of customers would be there today I made a bunch of cheap baked goods aimed at kids and a lot of stuff for gifts. I had snowmen decorated cupcakes made with homegrown pumpkin cake for $1.50 and 2 packs of snowmen decorated snickerdoodles for $1.50. That was pretty cheap but I was going for volume. I sold one cookie pack to a hungry vendor and that was it! After 2 hours I dropped the prices to $1 to see if they would sell. They did not. I couldn't get anyone to even look at them. The Santa pics thing also had some free candy and crafts to make plus there was the free face painting. I think after all that the kids weren't begging for stuff as I hoped they would. But even the parents weren't looking at anything. Plus the 'regulars' aren't showing up in any numbers. I think next month I will have samples and get pushy with them but I don't think there is anything going on at the community center that day so I expect it to be worse.

Here is today's offering. I made one major oops, I left my sweet potatoes at home. I loaded everything up out of the cooler, pulled the vehicle around to the front door and changed clothes and took off. Since they were in the cool storage room, I just forgot them.

I thought it was a very successful day, I only had 6 bags of greens left out of 102. I counted money, and I made $20 less than the previous market. The difference could have been made up with the sweet potatoes. I purposely picked less for this market, after last market, I didn't want to have so much left over. Could have sold more red lettuce, sold out by 9:35 (market started at 9). Had way more carrots than I needed.

We had 30 vendors, the most we have ever had, but still not the stellar day I was hoping for, but I am not complaining.

Lazygardens: It was 25 degrees outside this morning, any produce vendors product would freeze and I am not sure anyone would willingly want to stay outside for 3-4 hours. We did put up the sandwich boards at intersections near the building. A big sign would be nice, but I am not sure if it would help. The location is away from the busy roads, but easy to get to.

Jay

This post was edited by jrslick on Sat, Dec 6, 14 at 21:05

I started doing a different market for the winter and wow, it's super good. I've sold out my first two weeks. It's outside, last week it was 30 degrees and today it was 40 and steady raining but people just kept coming and coming. Sold out of 50 heads of lettuce at $2.50 each and almost a bushel of sweet potatoes. Not to mention all the other greens. Sometimes a different market is all the difference in the world.