Good afternoon from Butler & Bailey Market. We continue to have nice weather in Rocky Hill, and the football team won Saturday, so the mood around here is on the upswing. It is fall break this week, which slows business down for us. I guess since all the schools are closed for the week, a lot of families leave town. It happens every fall and spring, so we just know to plan accordingly. It does make traffic coming and going from work a lot easier to deal with. I guess that’s the silver lining in the cloud of slow business.
I talked to Barbara Tenney in the store this morning. She was buying groceries to prepare for her cooking class this week. For those of you that do not know her, she is kind of a local celebrity in gourmet cooking circles. We have had the good fortune of her doing cooking classes at the store for probably the last fifteen or twenty years. She loves doing the classes. Right now, we are doing two classes a month, which usually sell out as soon as they are offered. Hopefully, we will be able to start doing more in the future. She has had a couple of setbacks with her health, so she is just getting back to doing them on a regular basis. If you haven’t come to one of her classes, you should give one a try. You will get the always entertaining Barbara Tenney demonstrating how to prepare each course of the meal as well as the recipes. And the best part, you will be served a full, sit-down meal before the night is over. Everyone always enjoys them, which I guess is why they are in such high demand.
Well, we got our new chicken warmer this week. Not real exciting. It is new and shiny but still not real exciting. Our new computer system that I don’t think we need comes next week. It’s a shame that things which cost as much as my kids’ college educations give me zero excitement.
We also got some 12 packs of peach Fresca this week. That’s probably even less exciting to you than the chicken warmer or computer. Actually, the peach Fresca may get exciting, and not just for the customer I got it for.A few days ago, I had a customer ask me to get her some peach Fresca. Honestly, I thought we already had it, but she assured me we didn’t when I went to look for it on the shelf. We did have a whole bunch of regular Fresca, which is actually grapefruit Fresca. I told her I had the regular Fresca she could get until I get some peach in. She said she can’t do regular Fresca because certain medications can’t be mixed with grapefruit juice, and she could have a bad reaction, so she needed the peach flavor. Another great grocery man move, argue with a customer and try to kill her with regular Fresca. Anyways, I told her I would talk to the salesman and get some in for her. Not long after our conversation, the Coca-Cola company salesman came in. They are the ones that sell Fresca products to us. I asked him to send me some peach Fresca on the next order. He said he couldn’t. I said oh, are you out of it? He replied, no we have plenty, I just can’t sell it to you. Me, you can’t sell me peach Fresca? We’re talking peach Fresca, not really a life changing request. Why can’t you sell it to me? Him, it has something to do with contracts and corporate offices. I will ask my supervisor again tomorrow if I can send some. I thought they would realize there was some mistake and gladly send me some next time. Nope, he comes back in next time. I ask him about it again and the answer is still no. He said his supervisor told him I could call the corporate office and see if they would agree to sell me peach Fresca.
Well, my time has little to no value, but I’m sure not going to waste what value it has calling corporate offices and begging for peach Fresca. I just went to a competitor and bought some of theirs, brought it back here and put it on the shelf. The most aggravating thing about that is that I can get in my car at the store and drive four miles in any direction to a competitor and buy peach Fresca, yet they won’t sell it to me. Not to mention, once I pay retail price plus sales tax from a competitor, then put it on my shelf, I will lose money on every pack I sell. No big deal, we have to do that quite a bit on various products that customers ask for that we can’t get. We may lose a little money on the products but not near the loss of losing a customer.
The difference with doing it with Fresca is that makes me a bootlegger in the eyes of corporate Coca-Cola. You see, if I sell a coke product that I didn’t buy from Coca Cola, they would say I’m in breach of that previously mentioned contract, even if I try to buy it from them and they won’t sell it to me. Well, I put it on the shelf Monday, today is Wednesday, and those five twelve packs of peach Fresca on my shelf have already been discovered, reported, and the news has already made its way to the corporate office at Coca-Cola and I had a message on my desk this morning to call Coca-Cola corporate. They wanted to talk about opportunities with me. That’s just code for we found out what you did and, if you don’t call and suck up to us and beg for forgiveness, we will turn you over to our legal department.
The irony of this is their number one product in the store is Topo Chico 12 pack bottles. We sell more of it than Coke or Diet Coke or anything else they sell. Well, the company has been out of it since early Spring. I guess they screwed up their production process and had to close the plant that produces it. They didn’t bother to tell me this; Google told me this. The salesman told me this week that we are down over a thousand cases of sales this year on Topo Chico alone. They sell for around fifteen dollars a twelve pack, so you can do the math on how much money we have lost on that Coca-Cola product. Has the company called me about the lost sales of a thousand cases of Topo Chico to “talk about opportunities”? Nope. Crickets. No explanation, no apology, no nothing…and yet they call me about five twelve packs of peach Fresca on my shelf! You may ask yourself, self, why is a big corporation like Coca-Cola wasting their time calling to bully a little neighborhood grocery store in Rocky Hill about peach Fresca. They are just a drop of water in Coca-Cola’s ocean of business. Well, that’s why. They would never call and question a big chain store. They add a lot more water to the ocean than we do. Big chains actually dictate the terms of contracts to them, not the other way around. So, I guess after the big chains bully them around all year, they need to find someone they can bully around, and we are an easy target. Just a drop in their ocean of business is inconsequential to them.
I’m not going to call them back. Clearly, they know how to find me since they have already found the five twelve packs of peach Fresca on Aisle 10 of the store. But I do want to do my part to make peace with them. It serves no purpose for me to stay mad at them day after day, and it sure doesn’t help our fragile relationship for them to be mad at me.
Well, when I get frustrated in relationships at work or in life in general, I count on an old Dave Mason and a song from 1977 called “We Just Disagree” to soften my heart towards my frustration. You know the one…
to hear “We Just Disagree” on YouTube!
“So, let’s just leave it alone,
‘cause we can’t see eye to eye.
There ain’t no good guy, there ain’t no bad guy.
There’s only you and me, and we just disagree”.
That’s part of the chorus (you can thank me later for getting that song stuck in your head for the rest of the day). So, I played that song, and I immediately calmed down. I think Dave meant it to be a sad love song about a man and a woman, but I’m thinking it’s applicable for a lot of things, even corporate disputes. So, instead of calling Coca-Cola back, I decided to bootleg a copy of the song and email it to their corporate office. I think when they play it around the office, it will probably soften the hearts of their legal team, and they will want to make peace as well?
You can believe as much of that story as you want but I bet when my wife reads this, she is going to think, ”Oh, no! did he really do that? Knowing him, he probably did.” Meanwhile, I’ll be here waiting for Coke’s heart to soften and trying to catch every drop of business I can in my small bucket, even if I have to bootleg peach Fresca.
I hope everyone has a great weekend!
Thanks for letting us be a part of your community!
Tom Butler