Well, We made it through. The 100th anniversary of the store appears to have been a big success. Thank goodness it only comes around once every one hundred years. It was a lot of hard work, but everyone at the store and many others like our vendors, the village, and the Fire Department stepped up to make it a very successful week. The week started off slow, and we were actually worried that we were going to be left with a ton of product afterwords. On Tuesday, we ran out of ads, which was a pretty good indicator of what we were in store for. As word of mouth circulated, we got busier and busier as the week went on. By Thursday we were all beginning to drag pretty well. Dave, Pam, and I put in a lot of hours and all we seemed to get out of it was ungrateful customers who were unhappy about limits on this or problems with that. It was really starting to get discouraging. We were moving through the product however, and my worries about having too much product quickly turned into worries about having too little product. Saturday rolled around and I put in almost an 18 hour day. I was there at 5:45 to let the ice cream truck in. When we opened, the people rushed in to get their pop tarts and poweraid and immediately complaints about the limits on the pop tarts began. I was not looking forward to the 100 minutes of mayhem if this is how it was going to be. As the day rolled on, it gradually got better. By the time we closed at 7:00, I was actually in a pretty good mood, working on fumes, but in a good mood. We quickly got everything in place for 9:00 and as we did, the line outside grew very large. I was told that at one point it was down to grandma’s house.
When we opened the doors, Cinde tried to do it real quick, but when she turned the closed sign over, it broke and fell down, plus when she turned the door on, she was standing in front of the sensor, so it wouldn’t open when people tried to come in. Added to the fun I suppose. Within about 30 seconds all of the carts were gone, and people calmly waited in line while the carts cycled around. Everyone was in a good mood and the entire evening was a lot of fun. I had checked to make sure everything was ringing up correctly before we opened, but I failed to check the Doritos. Of course, they were not ringing up right, so my first task was frantically trying to figure out why they were not ringing up right and fixing it, not easy when you are about ready to fall asleep right then and there. I found the problem and got it fixed. I ended up bagging groceries most of the rest of the night. I don’t know if I’ve ever bagged that many groceries that fast, but it was fun nonetheless. We didn’t really run out of anything until about 10:30 which is pretty good considering we had no idea what to expect. We stayed open a bit later to let some last minute people in, and I got home about 11:30.
Sunday was a great day to finish out the week. We had our car show (or cruise in as I was corrected several times throughout the week). There was a good turnout for that. We also had our hot dog stand and sold a bunch of food that day. The highlight for me was when the life flight helicopter from Cleveland flew in and landed in Dad’s field across from the store (thanks Jen for setting that up). That was pretty cool to see. All in all, it was a great day and a great end to the week. After starting off poorly, it definately improved and I’ve gotten many positive comments since which made all the hard work well worth it.