Eliminating Travels

There weren't too many vendors that traveled very far to the Hayward Zucchini Festival and I don't blame them.

And we are joining the crowd by eliminating distant shows in order to maximize profits and minimize expenses. We will not be doing the Morro Bay Harbor Festival in early October and Clovisfest in late September. For many years, we have been participating in these events. We have really enjoyed our trips to Morro Bay while spending the weekend there in a Motel. We always went over to Giovanni's along the wharf area and had some of their fish and chips...actually I always got the Halibut and Chips, which were the best I have ever eaten.

There's quite a bit of overhead involved in doing the Harbor Festival...$350 for a booth space, $160 for a motel (2 nights) and another $100 for gas. So, that's over $600 right off the bat. Shows have been slow and vendors are not guaranteed making great sums of money at any show and we realize that our net profit for this event would be quite low. We decided to forgo the Festival and do a local Flea Market on Saturday. Never thought I'd be doing Flea Markets, but have to cut costs somehow and it looks like the net profit from one day would be close to what would be made at the Festival. Same for Clovisfest, which is also an expensive show to do and I wouldn't expect to make a lot of money there....and the same would be for a huge majority of vendors. So, we will do the DeAnza College Flea Market the first Saturday of October and the Chabot College Flea Market on the third Saturday of September.

Also, in order to cut travel costs, we are combining a number of shows in January and February into one 5-week trip, doing events in Yuma, Tyson Wells and Kernville. We have also phased out the Lake Havasu Winterfest, which is in early February .and have found that people there were just not spending money...just out for a stroll. It was a nice event for us, but like so many vendors are doing, we need to cut back on our traveling road shows!!!

In most of the shows/events, we will probably see perhaps 20-30 percent fewer booths, which were probably filled in the past by out of town vendors. If the economy continues and the wrong person becomes president, we can see things getting really bad, etc.