I'm eating my lunch. My wife made bean soup from a hambone from a pig I got from a fellow who fed it with my feed. It is pretty good stuff.
I've been selling hay, I just got 3,400 lbs of barley seed delivered so I need to plant. I have a lady coming for 16 bags of chicken feed, so I need to bag and sew another 8 bags and I'm out of bags.
We sold a load of hay to a fellow who is a long time customer. Sometimes he bugs the crap out of me. He got some hay that was not as good as he thought. We have tons and tons of hay in our barn. If you get some hay you don't like you have to exchange it or something. I don't know how to do it one bale at a time. Everyone else loved the hay and kept coming back for more. I have no idea.... I'd have just given it too him if he wouldn't have acted so strange about it.
Then I made the mistake of trying to sell him oat pellets. He can't buy the oat pellets cause he doesn't know what is in them. He can't buy my ground feed cause he doesn't know what is in it. I did tell him we had a contract with the government for toxic waste which we put into chicken feed just to spite him. He didn't think that was funny.
He pointed to the sprayer truck and thought that we put all those chemical on the oats and blah, blah, blah.
So, he said he would take a big bag of oats. He said the back that was on the truck outside might be wet or moldy. I said, well you think we just leave the bags outside all the day long? Obviously we moved that truck out to get you hay! You think I want to sell you crappy oats?
Sometimes I feel tired...
Posts
I remember from selling firewood and Christmas trees that some customers just aren't worth the bother. I'd just apologize for whatever the imagined shortcomings were and then tell about the guy down the road who had stuff that was so much better than mine. If they came back, I'd tell them about another person who had even BETTER stuff! It usually worked.
ReplyDeleteGreat solution Gorges. Wish I'da thought of that when I was 24 and selling feeder pigs. Man showed up and wanted to buy 70-pound pigs at per head 40-pound price. I told him where the co-op scale was where I weighed, but no he said he always eyed them at 40 lbs and paid accordingly. Made it sound like he was trying to save me some trouble. Of course he was one of the Large Operators and I believe I got my first insight into how you become a Large Operator. Didn't sell him the hundred pigs he wanted at half price, he left a little cranky.
ReplyDeleteBudde, if you need Bag of Oats Guy's business or whatever community connection he represents, you pretty much have to keep him written into the script. Gorges has great advice for directing him to exit stage left about a hunnert miles and if that doesn't work, exit stage right a hunnert fifty.
Hope Oats Guy catches you on days when the lazy farmer humor vein runs strong. It's the only legal antidote to damned and pernicious fools.
Petty funny technique Gorges! I have in fact used that one myself. I got part way through the sale pitch and he asked me why I told him I didn't have any oats earlier in the winter. I think it was because he annoys me so much I just tell him I'm sold out. I told him he should buy his oats from the neighbor who cleaned and bagged them as that improved the quality. He then thought I was being sarcastic, which I was...
ReplyDeleteCollieguy, I am not so much a fan of the BTO style of business myself. Oat-boy annoys everyone. I just need to laugh it off as it doesn't really matter