What a strange opening day. Unlike any previous I’ve been a part of (hard to imagine any I haven’t been a part of was like this either), and while there were a lot of positives, I hope that it’s unlike all our future opening days.
There is a strange behavior that people (maybe just our customers) exhibit, and that is everyone arriving early to “beat the rush”. You all do it, and you form the rush you are trying to beat. Previously the example we all talk about is the “Wednesday before Thanksgiving line-up before opening” crowd, they’re all there to not get stuck in line, but they create a line and are the group that waits the longest in the longest line. Today topped that by a wide margin, we had people reporting a 2 hour wait (!) in the line in the morning. It had dropped to about 45 mins - half hour by noon, and was about 5 minutes by 1 pm, never to grow again. The first 3 hours of our 11 hours of being open, you had a 2 hour wait, the next 8 (!) it was a shorter wait than standing in line in a normal year. To me the lesson is, you can’t “beat the rush”, you can only participate/cause the rush. Of course, my dad was always the one to suggest we stay seated and wait for everyone else to leave the baseball stadium after the fireworks.
Also I came to a realization today, that I desperately hope is wrong. It’s that the vast majority of my customer interactions this year are going to be negative, even though the overwhelming majority with the business are incredibly positive. On busy days when I’m really needed as a part of the production staff, I’m not going to be able to do the curbside pick up role, meaning that I’ll do very little direct customer service. The only times when I’m doing direct customer service and interaction is when I am needed to address an issue. I direct the staff to get me whenever possible, or I am the one reading and responding to emails, because I want all issues to not just be listened to, but be truly heard in a way that can resolve the issues or bring a resolution that satisfies the customer. Missing for me now are seeing and catching up with regulars, or seeing how pie, cider, and donuts can (because they should) light up a face with joy. Instead of joy, I only hear when someone’s day is ruined (or they are ruining their day) over pie, donuts, or cider. I really hope I’m wrong, and that I can find a way to have interactions that uplift my soul the way that giving samples of cider 3+ generations of the same family does. Thanks Covid.
Maybe that was all too honest and revealing (it’s certainly riddled with typos), but I’m running on multiple days in a row of 4ish hours of sleep and here it is under 5 hours away from my alarm going off.
