Chocolate Sale

From this......55 lbs of chocolate



To this. Larry and Jake pricing chocolate









I decided to take part in a Farmer's Market today in St, John's.

As most spaces at the market are pre booked, remaining spaces are available on a week to week basis only. This leaves a bit shorter notice than I'd like. I make my items fresh and the short notice means a lot of work in a short period of time. But....I made it!

Events like this are not really Tyler's cup of tea. He opted to stay at home. Brittney wanted to come --- not only to help but also to look around at the other vendors' booths as well (read: to shop). Larry likes to be 'out in front' too whereas I prefer making the chocolate items (hmmm wonder who Tyler takes after?).

That leaves Jake. For those of you who know him, you know which position in our family business *he* prefers. Yep, you guessed it.....salesman. As soon as he found out I was going in the sale and that he could come, he was over.the.top with excitement. This is putting it mildly too...the last few days have been a challenge for me keeping my cool while I helped him keep himself calm. He loves people and when I asked him what he thought of selling, he replied, "Are you kidding me??? I love it.....it's exciting.....it's unique.....it's awesome!!!"

This excitement soon earned him the title of Chief Salesman...and I must say, he lived up to that title. He was up at 6:00 a.m., dressed, had breakfast and ready to go, long before the rest of us. When we arrived there, he helped set up and wrote out name tags for each of us to wear. His of course, had his first and last name as well as both middle names.

When the sale started, he promoted, explained and sold a lot of chocolate. I mostly stood back and watched. He calculated total purchases in his head and did pretty well with the change. Larry was there to oversee, and while Jake needed some help calculating change, he did very well figuring out total amounts of each purchase.

Brittney did well too, explaining about the chocolate....the different types, the fillings etc. She enjoys working with/meeting/talking to people too and also does well with this skill. There were a couple of tense moments though when she accepted some money from a customer......Jake saw this as his job and his job alone. He didn't like her intruding on *his* territory, he was not impressed and let her know too. I'm pretty sure others could tell as well.....Oh my...

It was a good day though. We enjoyed some time working together. I feel they learn so much from these events and I count them highly in our homeschooling experience. Math, handling money, social skills, working as part of a team, operating a business, communication/language skills ........the list goes on.

At the end of the day, I was going to pay them ....in chocolate (what else). They both said no, they didn't expect anything because they wanted to come along and really enjoyed the day. Jake went on to say I needed to make a profit and it wouldn't help if I gave chocolate away for free. So....back and forth we went trying to figure something out. I wanted them to have something for free, he wanted to pay and I didn't want to do that. Eventually, we were able to work out a deal that he thought was acceptable....he chose something he liked....I gave him a discount and he paid the rest. At first I suggested he could have it half price....he thought 25% would be best.

He drives a tough bargain, eh? ;0)