What a Wacky Weekend

Last weekend was SO weird. My mom and I sold curriculum at the local homeschool fair, which we’ve done every year for six or seven years now. We usually have an easy time, talking, selling, explaining, and meeting people.

This year, though, we kept having bad scares.

Scare One: We had our first shoplifting incident. We sell a small, cartoon-illustrated, children’s catechism. It’s a two volume set, quarto size (the size of a piece of copy paper folded in fourths). So we’re setting up, talking to people, making sales … and someone asked about the catechism. So I reached over to get it, and only found one volume! Sigh. We figure someone’s kid came through, liked it, and walked off with it. It’s so small that the mom wouldn’t notice it being slipped into a pocket, and by the time it came to light, the show would have been over.

Scare Two: Mom was selling to this one lady, and the lady asked for one of our new products — a four-pack of charts for $25. It’s kind of noisy in the exhibit hall, so when the lady said, “I’d like the four,” Mom thought she wanted four of the chart-packs. So she put four of them in a bag and figured the lady’s bill. Of course, when the bill was $100, the lady clarified that she wanted just one four-pack. But just as Mom was refiguring the bill, another person came up and started asking questions. Flustered, Mom managed to get the first lady’s bill redone and accepted her payment — but she forgot to take the extra charts out of the bag. It was about thirty minutes later when she figured out what she’d done, and by that time, of course, it was too late. All we could do was pray that God would cause that lady to realize that she had too many things in her bag, and return them before she left the conference. Two hours later, we were each working on separate sales, when I saw my Mom stop selling, and then hug this stranger. My Mom is not a “hugger,” so I was startled. But Mom told me, when we’d finished with the customers, that it was the lady who’d been given the extra charts, returning them. We were SO relieved that we weren’t out $75! And thankful that God had nudged that lady to check her stuff.

Scare Three: We take credit cards at our booth. Everything except AmEx. At one point, we got very busy, and one of us took a credit card payment, only to realize when we were totting up the hour’s totals that the number started with a 3 — an American Express! Oh, no! Fortunately, our practise is to have the customer fill out name, address, and telephone number in case our home office needs to contact them about the credit card transaction. I called the number, and the customer answered the phone. She’d already left the conference, but was willing to give me her card information over the phone. (I was profusely apologetic.) Whew!

Scare Four: It was nearing the end of the second day. We were tired. My Mom was selling to a lady and they were discussing math curricula when another customer came by. This woman just barged right into the math conversation — “I’m a math teacher, so ….” [“I know it all,” I guess.] Anyway. She talked and talked and talked and talked and talked. Finally, she asked about one of our books, and I showed it to her. She decided to buy it. But when I was figuring inventory some time later, I found that I was short one copy of this $30 book. We’d been fine an hour earlier, and I’d sold only the one book. We’d had only four customers in that hour, so it was fairly easy to reason what had happened. The last customer had walked away with our display copy, not realizing that a new, shrink-wrapped copy of the book had been placed in the shopping bag with her other purchases. Looking around, I saw that this very person was in conversation at the display booth two spaces over, so I walked over and explained that I believed I had inadvertently given her two copies. I asked if she would mind checking her bag, and sure enough, she had one in the bag and one in her arms. Another potential disaster averted!

All in all, it was a great weekend, and we had our best sales ever. But all that scariness made it less fun than usual. So now we’re brainstorming ways to prevent scares next year.