Free Golden Spoon!

YUMMY!

I think today is the best Free Day we have ever had. We didn't even know until this morning, 9 AM, that we would be doing one. Ralph's grocery store is having their Grand Re-Opening TODAY...it was scheduled for the 25th back in June. And do they have the generosity of providing us with that information (even when we ask)? NO.

Luckily the day was planned the way it was: Jared and I were suppose to be going to an accounting meeting together, so he had planned on missing class. He went in to La Jolla GS to fix something prior to our meeting and I got a call from him saying, "Do you want to hear some bad news?" He proceeded with telling me about how he saw all these corporate people walking around and a lot of commotion going on so he stopped one of them and asked what was going on. "Our Grand Opening." "Today?" "Yes sir."
Second lucky thing is that Jared had the energy and the mind frame to figure out how we could pull it off. If you recall back in March my Superman post, that gives you an idea of what kind of preparation USUALLY goes into one of these days. So while I sat in a calm, productive meeting, Jared was running home, picking up banners and signs, making phone calls, and helping set up a store for a free event. I got out of my meeting around 11:15 am and things were already rock'n at our store! The few changes that we made for this event were: it was for a free Mini (rather than a small- specifically because we didn't have the yogurt back-up we usually have); if you wanted anything else you paid full price (this is how we usually make money and pay for the event...you have to give up something when you only have 2 hours to pull it together); we ended it at 8 pm (that was when Ralph's was wrapping up their event); and we didn't have the huge labor cost because we made do with what we could get in a few hours notice.
Stephanie, our Assistant General Manager, pulled the rest of the day off by getting staffing covered, and coming in and running the rest of the show from 2 pm on. This allowed Jared to still do his homework, watch Corban while I went to my Midwife appointment, and make it to his evening class. She is awesome being so willing to take on this challenge with such little notice...and not a single excuse or complaint! So how successful was it? Well, we gave out about 2,400 yogurts (that's what DM and PQ did this year with 2 weeks of advertising), and about 1/3 of the customers were new- not very many of them were college students. That is huge for La Jolla because we always figure the majority of our customer base comes from UCSD. Now only time will tell if this helps us in the long run!

I am just so glad that Jared decided to go into the store early today!