Grocery Life November 16, 2018

By Tom Butler 

Good afternoon from Butler & Bailey Market. I hope everyone is having a good week. The sun finally came out today which I think is the first time this week. Better late than never.
       

I wanted to send out a quick reminder that our Holiday Open House will be tomorrow from 11 A.M.  to 2P.M. This is our biggest event of the year, so I hope you will join us. The store will be full of vendors sampling all of their holiday goods for you to try. Also, our staff will be preparing some of our holiday favorites for you to try. I am not sure what all we will make but I did see a lot of Prime Rib and Beef Tenderloin being prepared this morning.     

My family will be here helping as well as the families of some of the other staff. It has become a holiday tradition for us and I hope it has for you as well.
       

We look forward to seeing you tomorrow!

Tom Butler

Butler and Bailey Market

7513 S Northshore Dr.

Knoxville, TN 37919

(865)691-8881

Grocery Life November 2, 2018

By Tom Butler

Good afternoon from Butler & Bailey Market. I hope everyone is doing well. I have not written in a while, but we are getting into the busy season, so I need to get back to it. We have some important events coming up at the store and in the community that I need to let you know about.      

The first event is our annual Holiday Open House. This is our version of a customer appreciation day and since it falls right before the holidays it gives us a chance to let you sample all our favorite holiday recipes as well as those from our local vendors. I think all of our vendors from past years will be back this year and we are adding several new vendors. 

   A couple of our new vendors this year will be introducing their products in the store for the first time. One is a toffee maker from Dallas, Texas and the other is a cake and bread maker from Highlands, North Carolina. You might wonder how I discovered these folks and their products, and the answer is, I didn’t. Our customers find them and then they play matchmaker between us and the vendor. It is kind of like going on a blind date except its food. I’m not much of a blind date kind of guy. Most all of the blind dates I have been on, I felt like throwing up before they started and sometimes, I felt like throwing up when they ended. I will have the upper hand on this blind date because I am inviting hundreds of my friends to go on the date with me, so I hope you all will help me decide if their food creations are worthy of a second date for the store.   

The open house will be Saturday, November 17th, from 11 am until 2 pm. You all are invited and the best part, it’s free. This is our biggest event of the year, we are excited, our vendors are excited, so I hope you can come.     

The next event I want to tell you about is the 5th annual Rocky Hill Christmas Parade. It is December 1st and the festivities start at 3 p.m. I think the actual parade usually starts around six but let me check on that.  

This year there will be more live music, more food options, more activities for the kids and the parade itself is going to be bigger. The parade planners do a great job of organizing this every year! I think what they do best is somehow they make it bigger and better every year but still has that small community feel about it.         

Once again, the store will be one of the presenting sponsors of the parade. This community has been so kind to support us over the last twenty-eight years, I figure the least we can do is throw our support behind an event that has become so important to the community. People always ask me why we sponsor the parade but don’t do a float. Well, we get a float and then we donate it to Rocky Hill Elementary school to decorate and ride on. I figure no one wants to see me riding on a float and if they did, it would be only because they wanted to throw something at me. So, for your safety and mine, we will keep giving the float to the school. My family and I will enjoy watching the parade with the rest of the crowd. I hope you will join us!     

Getting back to blind dates, the last blind date I went on was with my wife. The way I remember it, she immediately fell madly in love with me. After our date, she bought me gifts, wrote me letters, baked me cookies and called me most every day. I remember being very cautious, somewhat skeptical and wanting to take it slowly. She was sure we were a match made in heaven and was really persistent in trying to overcome the cold shoulder that I continued to give her. Somehow her tactics finally prevailed, and we began a relationship. While I was still unsure of the potential of our relationship, I let it go on, figuring she would finally give up. Well she didn’t, and we ended up married.
Okay, okay ,okay, I just made every bit of that up. The only true part of that is the blind date and we got married. Well last month we celebrated twenty years of marriage which I am very proud of. She probably had no idea what she was in for and probably feels like throwing up every now and then but I’m glad she chose me to be her lifelong grocery man.       

I am also glad you all have chosen us to be your grocery store! I hope I keep having wedding anniversaries with her and business anniversaries with you!      

Hope to see you at the Open House and at the Parade!

Grocery Life November 15, 2017

By Tom Butler

Good afternoon from Butler and Bailey Market. I hope everyone is having a good week!
I just wanted to send out a quick reminder about our Holiday Open House coming up this Saturday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. The football game is at night so you can come enjoy all the foods we are preparing, go home, take a nap, and be ready to go by game time.

Our meat department will be using our favorite recipes to prepare beef tenderloin, prime rib, ham and pork tenderloin. Our bakery department will have several desserts you can try.

Barbara Tenney, our cooking class instructor, will be here with some of her favorite holiday foods along with the recipes to prepare them and a couple of our wine vendors will be on hand to help you with wine pairings for your holiday meals.

We will also be sampling numerous St. Claire and Sysco side dishes including cornbread stuffing. All of these sides are fully prepared so all you have to do is heat them up which is a big time saver.

Some of our local vendors will be here as well. Those will include Vienna Coffee, Doug Carnathan with Carnathan Honey, Gringo Salsa, Blackberry Farm Brewery, Mayfield Dairy, Planet H20 water, Mamie’s Cheese Wafers, Better in Blue, and Fanatic Brewery. Those are the ones I can think of the top of my head but am sure I have left some out.

I think my whole family will be here to help out. It has become somewhat of a tradition for us and it also signals the time when my kids start asking me repeatedly, “when are we going to get a Christmas tree?” I hope you and your family will join us!
See you Saturday and thanks for letting us be a part of your community!

Tom Butler

Click here to view past blogs

Butler and Bailey Market

7513 Northshore Dr.

Knoxville, TN 37919

(865)691-8881

Grocery Life November 10, 2017

By Tom Butler 

Good afternoon from Butler and Bailey Market. I hope everyone is having a good week! I haven’t written in a while but need to get started back. With the holidays upon us, we have a lot going on that I need to let you know about.

Business has been good this fall, so far. It probably would be better if the football team would win more games than they lose. People don’t seem as excited about spending money when they lose, which reflects in our numbers. I have figured out the best way to combat this is to have a beef tenderloin sale. Some of you have probably noticed that around the third week of October every year our tenderloin goes on sale. I probably don’t need to tell you what game that corresponds with. I guess if we ever win that game that will be the end of the October tenderloin sale. I think you are safe for the foreseeable future?

The next big event for the store is our annual Holiday Open House. This will be Saturday the 18th of November from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm. For those of you that have never participated in this event, this is when our store turns into a giant buffet line. We will be sampling all kinds of holiday foods, as well as some of our most popular local products. This is easily the most popular thing we do at the store every year, so make sure you mark your calendar to be here. We can’t wait!

The big event after that is the annual Rocky Hill Christmas Parade. It is on Saturday December 2nd at 6:00 pm. Festivities start at 4:00 pm. 

The parade is put on by the Rocky Hill Business Association, and a lot of folks give a lot of their time planning this event. It is quite the undertaking.  Josh, from our store, has helped out on the parade committee this year and has told me there will be several new things at the parade to make the experience better for everyone. The parade just gets bigger and better every year. I hope to see you there.

Once again we are doing our food drive for Second Harvest. You all have been great supporters of this over the years, and it has started out strong again this holiday season. We typically send them well over a thousand pounds of food each time we do this. We have five and ten dollar food bags already prepared here at the store. So if you want to help Second Harvest, just grab a bag when you are doing your shopping, and we will take care of the rest.

One thing that will be different this year with the food bags is we now have to charge sales tax on them. We have never collected tax on them in the past since we thought it was a donation of food to charity but as usual, I was wrong. The reason I know this is because the Tennessee Department of Revenue told me so. You guessed it; the store got audited this year.

So when you get audited, the state picks three years of past business and pours over all of your sales, purchases, and any other crap they can think of to agitate you. Once you give them all of the records they asked for, they wait a few weeks and then call you back and ask for more crap just to agitate you some more. This goes on for a couple of months and then they come back with a bunch of questions that my ten year old son could answer. So I guess they only do it to agitate you again. Well after it was all said and done, the only question that remained was about the food bags that go to Second Harvest. So I explained to them that we make these bags, customers buy the bags and put them in a bin. When the bin fills up, Second Harvest comes and picks them up. I even gave them pictures of the bags, the filled bins, and the Second Harvest truck backed up to the store for pickup. Well they weren’t going for it, which further agitated me. In the end, they decided I needed to pay sales tax on all the bags we had sold over those three years. So after pouring over three years of my business records, and millions of dollars in transactions, the only thing the state could come up with is we didn’t collect sales tax on our charity food drive. I guess no good deed goes unpunished? 

Around this same time, a friend of mine was in the store and told me he was going to some statesmen dinner in Nashville. I jokingly told him if he saw the governor, tell him I am not happy about having to pay this tax bill. Well it wasn’t long before a got a phone call from some high ranking politician in Nashville. I told him my story and it seemed to agitate him. He told me he would make some calls and get back to me. The following week, I was driving my son up to Pennsylvania to skateboard camp, and we had stopped for gas. My phone rings and it is a Nashville number. Assuming it was him, I answered. Well, it was the director of the Tennessee Department of Revenue along with a couple of more officials conferenced in. I wasn’t really prepared for a conversation with them sitting in my truck at a gas station somewhere in Pennsylvania, but what do you do? I told them my story, and how I didn’t think it was right for them to tax the bags. After they gave me some long explanation that made no sense to me, they told me I was wrong. I then proposed that I send the tax amount they claimed I owed to them to Second Harvest instead. Wrong again.
   

Well, sometimes I get to the point when I have said my piece and I know it is time to take my ball and go home. That time had come, so I sent them the check and I was a free man again.
       

Obviously this whole ordeal agitated me, but I will say all the folks at the state that I talked to were very nice and took the time to listen to me and explain why they were doing what they were doing. They were also very complimentary of the store and our customers for doing so much to help Second Harvest. They’re probably good folks, just having to do a tough job.
     

I am sure when they added up the sales tax bill for the bags it was hard for them to believe the customers of a little neighborhood grocery store in Rocky Hill could and would do so much for charity, but they don’t know Rocky Hill. I did my best to enlighten them!
     

Thanks for all of your support of the store and the various needs of our community and thanks again for letting us be a part of your community!

Tom Butler

 Butler and Bailey Market

7513 Northshore Dr.

Knoxville, TN 37919

(865)691-8881

Grocery Life November 2, 2016

By Tom Butler

Good afternoon from Butler & Bailey Market. I hope everyone is having a good week! The last time I wrote, the Vols were undefeated and the weather was hot and dry. Well, it is still hot and dry. The Vols have seemed to take a turn for the worse. That will probably hurt our business a little bit. Happy people seem to spend more money than disappointed people.

The holidays are just around the corner so I wanted to give you a couple of dates to put on your calendar. On November 19th from 11a.m. to 2 p.m., we will be having our annual Holiday Open House at the store.
We will be preparing some of our holiday favorites for you to sample. We will also have several local and national food companies sampling their favorite holiday items. This is a free event and is a great opportunity to get some great ideas for your holiday parties and meals. I hope you will be able to join us!

The other date you need to write down is December 3rd at 6:00 pm. This is when the third annual Rocky Hill Christmas Parade will happen. This event gets bigger and better every year so I hope you will be able to come and see what a special event this is for our community.

It is hard to think about, much less plan for the holidays when it still feels like summer outside, but I am sure all that will be changing soon. One good thing about the arrival of the holidays, at least for me, will be this presidential election will be over with.

Whenever I talk about politics I get a lot of emails, most of them from people that seem to not appreciate my sense of humor so I am not going to comment on the candidates. I will tell you that neither one of them was my choice. So what do you do when you should vote but don’t like the candidates? I went and voted twice, that way I could vote against both of them.
Who says the election is rigged?

Have a great weekend!

Thanks for letting us be a part of your community,

Tom Butler

Respond to:tom.butler44@gmail.com

Click here to view past blogs

Butler and Bailey Market

7513 Northshore Dr.

Knoxville, TN 37919

(865)691-8881