Making Work

These days I often base my decision to vend at a new market on the fact that every vending opportunity creates work, and people need work. My business has built an infrastructure over the years, and it's often not difficult for us to pick up new markets and make use of unused parts of that infrastructure by preparing a little extra food at the kitchen we're already leasing, and using a van and some equipment on days when they would otherwise sit ide. Even if we just break even, we're seeing what can come of this opportunity and we're making work.

There have been raging debates the past few years about whether new markets "cannibalize" existing markets, siphoning their market share and their clientele. The way I see it, they do and they don't. There's certainly the potential for someone who wants great tomatoes to stop at one market rather than another because it's more convenient. There's also potential for someone who wants great tomatoes to buy them rather than not buy them on a particular day because there's a convenient market nearby that hadn't been there a year earlier.

We're picking up a brand new market this year at Willis Tucker Park, in Snohomish. It's on Friday afternoons, so traffic is going to be hell, but I'm excited. Friday markets tend to be challenging. They're not like other weekday markets, where folks come on their way home from work and probably don't have anything else to do that evening. They're also unlike weekend markets, which tend to be more leisurely because folks often go there as a day-off activity. This new market is in a busy park with a swimming pool. I'm hoping it'll have some of the qualities that make weekday markets succeed as well as qualities that make weekend markets work.

We'll see. In any case, I'm be making work for my staff.