We have a closing date now. May 11 will be the last regular retail day of the year. The days at work are different now. The end of the road is in sight and there is a tendency to just relax and wait. "Dudeman" has it about right in the photo to the left. Customer pressure is low so there is plenty of time to do nothing if that is ones choice. Instead of doing nothing we should be staying hard at it so that we have less to do in late May after we are technically closed. To keep motivated we are running an advertised sale from the 25th till the last day. This means pricing all the inventory, creating sale tags and doing all the merchandising. It is also a good excuse to schedule everybody for the weekend of the 25th and 26th and have an end of the year dinner the evening of the 25th. It should be fun. I expect to sell a lot of gear and the prices really are going to be down and dirty so the customers will be excited too!
In the meantime in addition to sale preparations, we continue to do inventory counts and the shop is starting to do the yearly maintenance on the rental fleet. Martin added some machinery that speeds up the waxing process for rentals and it maintains a bath of melted wax which makes the shop smell good! End of season tune ups are the main labor request at this point, but many are still at it and coming in for spring snow wax jobs. Todd's last official day was Saturday. His wife Ashley is doing job training on the East Coast for a few weeks so he is Mr. Mom until she is back. So it's mainly John, Martin and myself holding down the fort and everyone else has lost their work hours until the sale starts. Brian still comes by most days to work on his "frankenboot" project, and Christian, JJ, and others come by just to hang out for a bit. All in all it's kinda like the end of senior year of High School. It will all be over soon, there is not a lot of pressure to work too hard, final exams (or clearance sales) are upcoming but overall the hard work is done and we are just enjoying our final days together before we do what we do in the summer.
2 comments:
What do you guys do in the summer?
Xander,
We spend about a month doing genera maintainence, cleaning, and prepping for the next year. Then we do a lot of mountain biking, golfing, fishing and the like. Some of us have other summer gigs as well. Brian fights wildland fires for instance. Shipments start arriving August 1st so at that point we are back at the shop recieving, pricing and merchandising in preperation for opening back up at the end of August. Not a bad life!
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