Barre Hannaford's

Grand Re-opening

Headed out from Home about 4:45 Roads were a little icy when I left but the town plow had just gone by so the road wasn't bad & by the time I got to Hardwick they were mainly just wet, so smooth sailing on down to Barre.

Arrived at Hannaford's about 5:45 and there was already a line waiting to get in so I was thinking oh boy! this is going to be a big one.

Froggy 100.9 was just pulling in as well.

Got inside and did my running around to find my contact Graig and introduced myself, and he said we already have you a table set-up with a table cover & Balloons. I said thats great Thanks, I asked him just tell me where and I'll go get set up. He directed me to the Produce aisle, which I wasn't fond of, but I went on over and found my spot. 

It was about a 3' table right in front of the entrance to the produce supply room. I wasn't real happy when I saw it but I kept smiling and went back and asked him if I could use a bigger table since I was doing 4 samples and he said they were cramped for room maybe I could just do 2, so I asked about something near the dairy aisle and he said they had their Promo Co. working over there and it was cramped for space so I just did the best I could with what I had.

You can see where the doors are to the back room so when they went in and out with their carts I was in their way.

When they opened for business it was a deluge of people they said 350 people inside the 1st hr came in. Including Ole St Nick.

After that things slowed down and people were just walking by me and not stopping to I boogied back out to my rig and I had an old Plastic Cabot Table Mat that I draped around my table which helped me to get noticed.

Then things had slowed down to a normal volume for customer flow.

Craig came by a couple of times and I told him things had slowed down quite a bit and I guess he could see that himself so he arranged to move one his demos over to my spot and we moved my table and gear over to the dairy aisle.

Which I appreciated very much, It was still a cramped spot but 3 or 4 times more traffic flow over there.

They (Hannaford's) were passing out lots of coupons worth $2.00 on promoting Local goods so the Cabot bars were flying out.

I very much appreciated my move since I had a lot more meaningful interaction with customers being in dairy now right near our products, and right between two aisle end cap's, which increases traffic greatly

So after that it was clear sailing the rest of the way, although still not real busy, but much better than being next to tofu and veggies.

Hung out till 1:00 and packed up to head home, clean-up was much easier with my mini-setup which is usually much more elaborate.

Used only one box of toothpicks, but I was only sampling two flavors and lots of people still insist on using their "fangers".. 

All in all it was pretty decent day and I passed out about 200 coupons, 

Glad I could be a part of it. 

Jim Ovr'n Out