Appearances aren't everything, but they are important

[Aria]

Have you ever met local business person and wanted to give them advice?

I'm feeling that way about the lady selling her handmade chocolates at the farmer's market. They are nice chocolates and she does alcohol shot ones, which are really nice. However, her presentation just sucks. The biggest box she has will only hold about a dozen chocolates and it's plain white. Boooring. It's also quite flimsy and wouldn't survive shipping well.

I want to say to her, you need gilding! You need big boxes with bows! You need TINS! You need boxes that say, this is the best darn chocolate EVER! Send me to your friends and family as a gift!

But it's not my business so I said nothing and got a few chocolates for myself, rather than a big box for my mom. Getting two separate boxes would have been lame and I wanted to get her more than a dozen chocolates...

[Kittish]

You can phrase it as more of a request. "I'd love to have two or three dozen of these wonderful chocolates in a big, fancy presentation box! Have you thought of offering anything like that?"

[Seshat]

Have you ever met local business person and wanted to give them advice?

Oh, hell yes. Very much.

There's a box shop in our town that does a variety of presentation boxes, and the boxes are quite cheap: Bast will buy one of the boxes just to use as a gift box when giving one of her craftworks to family.

If the chocolates woman was in our town, box shop guy could easily supply her with boxes for her chocolates. Probably would even have the dividers to keep the individual pieces separate.

[Aria]

You can phrase it as more of a request. "I'd love to have two or three dozen of these wonderful chocolates in a big, fancy presentation box! Have you thought of offering anything like that?"

I did ask if she had any boxes that could hold roughly sixty dollars worth of chocolates, but she didn't. And I did mention the boxes were rather flimsy. Oh well, there's other great chocolates in the city. Especially this one place in the Core, although that requires a special trip.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Have you ever met local business person and wanted to give them advice?

Yeah.

President of the local Chamber of Commerce, you spend too much time in the tanning booth or something. You are too young to look that shriveled up.

[Kiwi]

We had a guy who does catering, he will come to any event in a dirty, stained polo shirt branded with his company name. The servers always look impeccable in their uniforms but when it gets busy he helps out but he looks so out of place.

I get that he is in the thick of it making the food and making sure everything is running okay but you would think given that people can see him he would wear something that at least fits over his stomach and doesn't have oil stains on it.

[protege]

Have you ever met local business person and wanted to give them advice?

Yep, one of the local hobby shops...which has since closed

For years, he was my go-to source for all sorts of weird kits that nobody else wanted--1980s Nissan Skylines, Subarus, and other kits. Most of that stuff was readily available for next to nothing. But, after I'd cleaned him out, he started getting complaints that his shelves were empty.

Why? Because he quit ordering stuff. Seriously. No new kits meant that certain rooms (like the model airplane section) were eventually closed off to customers. He also quit ordering things like paint. Months would go by before the racks would get refilled. How can you build models without paint or glue? Many people--especially newbies--aren't going to buy models if they cannot get the other things you need to assemble them! Many of them aren't going to wait or drive across town.

Also troubling, is that while the shelves downstairs were empty...the shelves in the attic were full! You name it, he had it up there gathering dust. Why this stuff--including some kits he was trying to sell for someone--hadn't been moved, I'll never know. Just how can you buy something...if you don't know it exists? Considering how rare some of that stuff was, it would have sold almost instantly.

The last conversation I had with him...involved the "going out of business" signs he'd taped up in the windows. He had said that he was going to take those down, since (according to the consultant he'd hired--too little too late) they were actually hurting sales. By then though, the writing was on the wall, and he closed not long after.

It really sucks, since I can't even get "service items" (couplers, springs, etc.) for my locomotives now. But, people, including his own employees, tried to help him stay in business.

[Dreamstalker]

The jerk I used to work for. Somehow he's still in business. When I was there a lot of business decisions were counterintuitive (when he screwed up and was being dunned by vendors his tactic would be to post "Come buy stuff" on facebook...might have worked if he didn't have a deserved reputation as "that expensive place").

He would reshelve items I had listed online--most of which he only had one of to begin with (which is why they were in the office and I had put a note in the computer to that effect). My suggestion that he order more so we didn't sell the same item twice was met with a condescending "you don't understand commerce, that won't happen"...it did.

[Aislin]

pink berry was a mom and pop yogert shop. Ferraro Concrete is a marketing/design company. They were her first client. For a stake in the business she took a small shop and turned it into the franchise it is today with the strong branding and identity it is today.