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dothann replied to your post “having worked three (four?) farmer’s markets in a row now i am wishing…”
@bomberqueen17 Please, please tell me more about your farmers market bullshit drama
Oh, man.
I mean, it’s like any human enterprise. Especially human enterprises where there’s a mixture of money and volunteerism. The overarching organization is, itself, often a kind of nonprofit, or something along those lines, but of course, all of the people within it are for-profit entities, usually (although! one of the neighboring farms is a nonprofit with an educational mission, which is fascinating, but that’s a sidebar! they have a book though! very cool).
So there’s constant drama, and like, the decisions have to be made by overworked, underpaid or volunteer people who have had to spend way too much of their lives making said decisions in as fair a way as possible, and then there are dozens of people furious about said decision, and everyone’s got to complain, and such.
Some of the dramas are large, and some small. Where people’s booths are, and who they’re next to. (At one point, some bright light decided the most efficient thing to do was to put like vendors with like, which makes sense for like all the food vendors maybe but sort of sucked when it was, say, both vendors selling chickens, and both vendors selling apples, right on top of one another, and you’d see your regular chicken customers get confused and buy from your competitor because they saw your sign right there and thought the competitor was you, because people are easily confused, and you want to be like, “Mrs Johnson, over here!” but that would be rude, and meanwhile your loyal customer is blithely switching allegiance without noticing.)
There was a huge drama at the end of the outdoor market season, as usual, because not every vendor from outdoors makes the cut to be indoors, which is a smaller and more selective space. And there was a sudden hurried push to move the market indoors one week early because the weather report was terrible, but while the indoor space was available, the market committee hadn’t yet had time to sit down and lay out who was going where, and didn’t have time before the morning of the market, so it would have been chaos; as it was, a bunch of vendors didn’t show up, and those who did were huddled miserably in 38-degree rain for the five hours the market’s open. (That’s the last market I worked! It was fantastic. BIL spent basically the whole thing walking from booth to booth getting bitched at. I just worked at the booth so he’d have time for that. We still sold like $600 worth of pork so he was unexpectedly pleased in the end.)
The most recent minor drama is that my brother in law is super offended by the woman whose booth is next to his at the indoor market, who’s been there for a couple of years now– she shorted him on a business deal over the summer, was rude when he wanted to just have a conversation with her (he listens to her complain about everything, including about him, with equanimity, but she won’t reciprocate at all), and the last straw is that last year he used to always haul out a ladder to hang up her banner for her every week, and this year he just hasn’t had time (or, truthfully, inclination), and he recently realized that she just– hasn’t hung up her banner one time. Like getting the ladder herself is just too much work to be worth it, so if he’s not gonna do it then it’s not gonna get done. It’s not like she’s some fragile old lady, she’s another farmer who spends just as much time on a tractor as BIL does. She just doesn’t care enough about the banner to do it herself, so if he’s not doing it for her then it’s not worth doing? He’s fairly miffed, and I think understandably so.
There are always dramas like this. Just, always.
There’s this kind of… mystique, in fiction, and in popular culture I think, about farmers, and about farmers’ markets especially, like somehow they’re purer or more wholesome or simpler than regular folk, or something? And just like anything, that’s not really the deal. But I guess it’s along the lines of coffee shop A/Us, too, where nobody has the problems a real retail/foodservice joint has (you have really annoying entitled customers but boringly so; the manager is dealing drugs and it’s dangerous and gross but not interesting; your coworkers are high or insane but mostly it just makes them unreliable and not particularly colorful, nobody ever fucking wants to work Saturday mornings but that’s when the store is busiest and you need your A-game but only your Z-staff will show up,etcetera); in fiction, nobody has the actual problems that farmers actually have (which, honestly, are sometimes pretty damn interesting but not always in good ways; mostly, unreliable labor, but we did have one of our farmers have an employee actually die in a horrible tractor accident mid-season this year and that was rough as hell).
The most dramatic thing that happened at the last farmer’s market I worked, though, was that the pastry lady’s EZ-Up tried to blow away while she was away getting her car, and the pickle guy and the pesto guy and I all had to run to catch it. It wasn’t too bent, we fixed it before she got back.
(Your picture was not posted)
dothann replied to your post “having worked three (four?) farmer’s markets in a row now i am wishing…”
@bomberqueen17 Please, please tell me more about your farmers market bullshit drama
Oh, man.
I mean, it’s like any human enterprise. Especially human enterprises where there’s a mixture of money and volunteerism. The overarching organization is, itself, often a kind of nonprofit, or something along those lines, but of course, all of the people within it are for-profit entities, usually (although! one of the neighboring farms is a nonprofit with an educational mission, which is fascinating, but that’s a sidebar! they have a book though! very cool).
So there’s constant drama, and like, the decisions have to be made by overworked, underpaid or volunteer people who have had to spend way too much of their lives making said decisions in as fair a way as possible, and then there are dozens of people furious about said decision, and everyone’s got to complain, and such.
Some of the dramas are large, and some small. Where people’s booths are, and who they’re next to. (At one point, some bright light decided the most efficient thing to do was to put like vendors with like, which makes sense for like all the food vendors maybe but sort of sucked when it was, say, both vendors selling chickens, and both vendors selling apples, right on top of one another, and you’d see your regular chicken customers get confused and buy from your competitor because they saw your sign right there and thought the competitor was you, because people are easily confused, and you want to be like, “Mrs Johnson, over here!” but that would be rude, and meanwhile your loyal customer is blithely switching allegiance without noticing.)
There was a huge drama at the end of the outdoor market season, as usual, because not every vendor from outdoors makes the cut to be indoors, which is a smaller and more selective space. And there was a sudden hurried push to move the market indoors one week early because the weather report was terrible, but while the indoor space was available, the market committee hadn’t yet had time to sit down and lay out who was going where, and didn’t have time before the morning of the market, so it would have been chaos; as it was, a bunch of vendors didn’t show up, and those who did were huddled miserably in 38-degree rain for the five hours the market’s open. (That’s the last market I worked! It was fantastic. BIL spent basically the whole thing walking from booth to booth getting bitched at. I just worked at the booth so he’d have time for that. We still sold like $600 worth of pork so he was unexpectedly pleased in the end.)
The most recent minor drama is that my brother in law is super offended by the woman whose booth is next to his at the indoor market, who’s been there for a couple of years now– she shorted him on a business deal over the summer, was rude when he wanted to just have a conversation with her (he listens to her complain about everything, including about him, with equanimity, but she won’t reciprocate at all), and the last straw is that last year he used to always haul out a ladder to hang up her banner for her every week, and this year he just hasn’t had time (or, truthfully, inclination), and he recently realized that she just– hasn’t hung up her banner one time. Like getting the ladder herself is just too much work to be worth it, so if he’s not gonna do it then it’s not gonna get done. It’s not like she’s some fragile old lady, she’s another farmer who spends just as much time on a tractor as BIL does. She just doesn’t care enough about the banner to do it herself, so if he’s not doing it for her then it’s not worth doing? He’s fairly miffed, and I think understandably so.
There are always dramas like this. Just, always.
There’s this kind of… mystique, in fiction, and in popular culture I think, about farmers, and about farmers’ markets especially, like somehow they’re purer or more wholesome or simpler than regular folk, or something? And just like anything, that’s not really the deal. But I guess it’s along the lines of coffee shop A/Us, too, where nobody has the problems a real retail/foodservice joint has (you have really annoying entitled customers but boringly so; the manager is dealing drugs and it’s dangerous and gross but not interesting; your coworkers are high or insane but mostly it just makes them unreliable and not particularly colorful, nobody ever fucking wants to work Saturday mornings but that’s when the store is busiest and you need your A-game but only your Z-staff will show up,etcetera); in fiction, nobody has the actual problems that farmers actually have (which, honestly, are sometimes pretty damn interesting but not always in good ways; mostly, unreliable labor, but we did have one of our farmers have an employee actually die in a horrible tractor accident mid-season this year and that was rough as hell).
The most dramatic thing that happened at the last farmer’s market I worked, though, was that the pastry lady’s EZ-Up tried to blow away while she was away getting her car, and the pickle guy and the pesto guy and I all had to run to catch it. It wasn’t too bent, we fixed it before she got back.
(Your picture was not posted)
