Penny wise and pound foolish

When we invite friends to our home and ask them to come over about dinner time, sure as shootin' they pretty much expect to have something to eat.  When our village invites people to drop in, likewise, folks who make the trip should be able to find food.

We were in the IGA today when two women swore off visiting our village "ever again" because, kids in tow, they visited our Maritime Festival and expected to find a hot dog stand or something where kids under six could get something to eat that 1. kids like and 2. wasn't a sit down lunch.  They found neither.  They blamed the "Greenport Restaurant Association" (whatever that is) for not permitting food vendors.  Having seen the the kerfuffle about outside food vendors at the Tall Ships, it was pretty evident what was afoot here and we shouldn't like it one bit.

It is, in the end, about turf and protecting businesses. We can understand the motivation and the necessity to make the most of the last major weekend event of the year.  We can't, however, buy into the math involved.

Village restaurants hold only so many people and at price points that are pretty steep for casual visitors. The Tall Ships were broken down to what a reasonable family of day-trippers would expect to spend overall and food and snacks for mom and dad and two little ones was thought to be in the $25-40 range give or take. For folks who want to sit down and order off the menu, of course the estimated price would increase. Well and good.  The issue then goes down to the nut of it; how many folks can the "restaurant association" feed?

Estimates run about 3500 plates in a day. That may be light or heavy but no one really knows. If 5,000 folks show up, the restaurants can probably handle the demand.  If 10,000 show up, they can't.  It is simple math. In the later event, we invited 10 for dinner with only 6 seats at the table.

Is there some way to figure it out so that the "restaurant association" gets the lion's share of business AND visitors of all economic brackets, age groups, and time to spend, can find a menu to suit them?  Yes. Of course there is.  But what happened was  that it became and all or nothing proposition. 

One of the first rules of business is that the customer us always right. The customer creates the demand.  In reverse, the village as a host said, "we determine what the demand will be" and it is as backward a statement as can be.  It slights the customer. It hurts non-food businesses by "pissing-off" visitors about the village in general and returning in particular. It causes grand mothers to wag their tongues in an IGA.

It is penny wise and VERY pound foolish.

Town Crier

Well the Maritime Festival weekend is here. No rain. The bluest sky on the planet and a nice NW breeze.

We wondered on downtown last evening to see the fireworks that never fired.  It was a pleasant wait until someone circulated through the crowd announcing that "due to government regulations" there would be no show.  Not to cast a pall (and it is pall not pale) over the evening, soothed a bit later by some expensive frozen yogurt, there were a lot of parents with kids in tow out there to see the lights and the things that go boom in the night. Some pretty long faces let me tell you.

Cast a pall is a good phrase for this. Pall of course coming from "pallor", something of a visual mask or something that obscures by, for instance, smoke or fog; diminishes the clear image.  We wondered what the government regulation was that cast this pall, we are wondering this morning about communication.  In this time of instant contact, e-mail blasts, IM on countless cells, Twitter, well you name it, we live in a village that has none.  We, the residents do. But it appears we are on the end of a broken line that starts with the "government regulations" and ends with a good soul wandering through the crowd announcing in a nice, clear voice that there were no fireworks.

Perhaps the role of "town crier" should be revisited and that a clearly visible kiosk would be apropos - and not the pink tinged monolith in front of a firehouse that goes off line at night.  It would be charming actually. "Eight o'clock and all is well and there will be no fireworks tonight due to government regulations".  We can hear it now.

Armed with the news, we could find out what government regulations required cancelling this event.  We could address the issue of who didn't do what that caused the government regulations to spring into effect. Perhaps we could find the government regulator who stood there at 8pm and said "no. not tonight. no how. no way".

Anyway, the pall was caste by the crier in waiting and we don't know what happened except that it didn't.