I haven’t written a blog in about six weeks. Hard to make the time and difficult to find the energy. Every nursery in this region is having record sales because of the winter weather. Weekdays are like weekends and weekends are like unbelievable. I won’t bore you with 15 stats to prove how busy it has been recently. What I will share is that our April sales in 2009 were very very good...but in the first two weeks of this April we have sold more than in all of April last year! We have added another full time cashier, a part time cashier, 3 temporary laborers to help unload and stock product, two part time salespeople and two more weekend load up help. We are still struggling to keep up. Every single full time employee has stepped up and has given our nursery extra time and effort. What a great crew!
 
Phone calls from consumers looking for freeze damage information or product availability have skyrocketed this year. I take many of these calls because the cashiers are busy at the registers and my daughters, Kelly and Sherri, are busy with operations throughout the nursery and away from their office phone. When I get a call asking if we have a particular plant I really need to go out and look to find out. What was there yesterday may have been sold 30 minutes ago. Product moves in and out all day long and I want to be sure I give a customer the best information possible. I have to put the customer on hold and walk outside to find the plant. Here is my dilemma. I need to get back to the customer on hold. I have to walk through my inventory and past customers that know me to find the plants that the customers on the phone need. I don’t want to ignore the customers at my store and I want to provide a quick response to my phone customers also. How do I do both? I open the back door and instantly survey a route to the area where the plants I am looking for should be that has a path with the least resistance. I walk fast and keep my head down. I smile and say hello if I come upon patrons that know me very well but I have to keep on walking. I try to look like I am searching for something. I try to look deliberate and intense. Inevitably, I will get asked a question while I am “in search of”. I have to say I am on the phone and need to get back to it. Then I have to run the gauntlet back to my office phone in the same manner and with the same excuse...the truth. When I finish that call I then have to go out and help those that requested me while I was out there. I may then possibly be away from the phone for 1-2 hours helping those customers from that one phone excursion...really!  It happens more often than you might think. If you ever wonder why we can’t answer every phone call...there it is. The nuts and bolts of demands and priorities at PFAS Nursery.

There was an interesting thing that happened this Spring that I would like to share. A well dressed lady came in on Good Friday and shopped for quite a long time. One of my employees went out to help her load her merchandise. She opened her hatchback and there were two dead road kill skunks laying there. The stench of skunks hit my employees nose like a sledgehammer. The lady grabbed the skunks, one in each bare hand, and threw them in the back seat. She explained that she was a biology teacher and that they were going to be dissected by her students on Monday. She went to shake my employees hand and he said he pulled back both his hands and stepped away from her and the vehicle. She got in the car, windows up, and drove away. Trust me. I couldn't make this up.