Announcing: your neighborhood MiMa!

I am so excited to announce that this summer Generous Servings will be hosting the world's first Micro-Market (MiMa)! I have joined a group of people who are committed to bringing local food to the Highland area, and we're going to have a weekly market on the Generous Servings patio featuring very local food and crafts. We really hope that this helps people eat more locally, because we'll be able to keep our prices low and guarantee that you're getting fresh, seasonal produce that hasn't been shipped from Chile or California and consumed fifteen times its weight in fuel just to get to the store. In fact, some of the products sold at the MiMa are going to walk over.

We'll have fruits and vegetables grown right in the neighborhood (including in my front yard), meats and eggs from the region (no one ranches in Denver, but the meat will be from within 100 miles), and prepared foods made from local ingredients, including my fast-growing line of homemade butter (sweet cream and old-fashioned cultured butter, plus flavored butters like orange-honey and garlic-herb...mmmm...).

When can you purchase these fantastic products? On Thursday afternoons between 2 and 6 pm, starting on May 14! We'll have a pre-order system set up soon so you can place orders too, since all the vendors will have small supplies and we don't want to run out too early. I'm working on a website for the Highland MiMa now, so I'll post the link as soon as it's decent. Meanwhile, if you know someone who has a lot of fruit or vegetables that he or she might want to sell, put us in touch!

Everyone's a critic

I know it is impolitic to complain about customers, but there have been four customers--total over the past 14 months--who have ruined my day. That's not a very large number, but those four people really stand out in my mind. And unfortunately, the most recent irate customer also wrote a review online, so if you happen to be one of our 800 satisfied customers, and you have a few minutes, it would be awesome if you'd write a little review online too, to balance things out. Not that I don't appreciate being personally identified as "heartless, rude, and insensitive".

I will admit to rude, occasionally, but I know who this reviewer was, and I wasn't rude to her. I didn't make an exception to our class cancellation policy (cancellations more than 7 days before the class get a full refund, within that time we give 50% credit towards a future class), and I think she felt that it was a rude policy, regardless of my tone while enforcing it. The tough thing is, when people have an emergency and can't come to a class they've registered for, they always think they should be the exception, because they have an EMERGENCY. But that's exactly what the policy covers, and maybe what they don't realize is that we're such a small business and the maximum number of people in each of our classes is 10, so if we didn't get any money from two people because they decided not to come to a class at the last minute, then we would lose at least 20% of our income for that day. Instead, our policy is to meet them halfway--which means we're still losing money because some random person's father-in-law or great-uncle died. That's a lot more consideration than you'd get from TicketMaster ("tickets cannot be cancelled, exchanged or refunded unless the event has been cancelled or postponed"), and it's more generous than some of the other cooking schools in the area (although they generally cap their classes at 24 people, so having a few people cancel is not such a big deal). But people still get mad at us. I don't know how to make this more fair to everyone.

Even if you do think I'm heartless, rude, and insensitive, please consider posting something saying I'm also witty and perceptive, or creative and hard working, or a good speller. If my obit writer relies on Google searches, I'd like him to discover some characteristic about me other than my rudeness. Then again, I'm probably digging my own grave right now. Does this seem like a rude post? Because I'm just trying to figure out the most fair way to run a business. We didn't name it Generous Servings by accident--we actually do try really hard to be generous. I better write a nice post next to regain some good karma.