Greetings from the gang at Mad Maggie's Ice Cream!

Well, things are gearing down now, as we zero in on the end of our third season. Our lease runs through the end of September, and the folks who run the flower market are already chomping at the bit to get the space back so they can use it as a staging area for their fall flower arrangements.

We're well into the process of discontinuing some flavors as we approach the end of the season. We'll use our inventory list of popular flavors as a guideline in making ice cream during this last week, so you'll see less-popular flavors like Blueberry and Snickers (and even my personal favorite, Massachusetts Mud!) disappear, while we'll keep Vanilla, Cookie Dough, Chocolate, Oreo, etc up until the bitter end.

In past years, we've run a BOGO (Buy one, get one) promotion on take-home quarts during our final week of the season, and then finished up the year by giving away whatever was leftover on our last two nights.

This year, we'll still run our BOGO promotion, but we're also running an additional offer: To help out the Andover Youth Services in their drive to raise money to build a new youth center for the youth of Andover, we're running a special promotion: Come by the store anytime during our last week of the season -- Saturday, September 24th through the 30th (or, until the ice cream is gone...), make a donation of at least $5 towards the Andover Youth Foundation building fund, and we'll *give* you a free quart of ice cream!

If we have anything left, we'll do our traditional giveaway on Thursday and Friday nights, so stop by and grab a quart or two to save in your freezer!

Plans for Next Year

Several folks have asked us about our plans for next year, so here's an update.

This has been a pretty good season for us -- not that we're rolling in dough, but we had good summer weather for the first time in our three seasons, and we've learned to better manage our expenses so that this year, for the first time, we'll actually have enough money in the bank so that maybe I *won't* have to write a personal check to cover our end-of-year expenses, including our trip to Scottsdale for the annual convention.

That said, I'd still guess that if you added up our modest profit, and divided by the number of hours Maggie and I put in to run the business, that we're getting paid well below minimum wage!

Things are definitely on the upswing though. Our sales should end the year up around 10% over last year, and we've certainly seen more name recognition, as the Boston Magazine article, our awards from last year's convention, and just general word-of-mouth have seemed to attract the true ice cream afficionados to our store. If we can continue to grow our business at 8 to 10% a year, I could see this becoming a nice little self-sustaining summer business, even at the current sub-standard location.

So at this point, we plan to reopen in the spring at the same location, but we'll again spend the winter looking around for a better spot. We'd love to move into the downtown Andover area, but I think at this point we consider that a very unlikely scenario. Wherever we end up, it'll undoubtedly be within shouting distance of our current location.

One other factor: The folks who run the driving range next door have been making noises for three years now about putting in a new miniature golf course to replace the decrepit joke of a course they have now. This year, it's actually happening, as they've already torn out the old structure, and are planning to have the new course installed in the next couple of weeks. This should be a bit of a boost for our business, although they seem to have cheaped-out and dropped the plans to clean out the swampy area near our lawn, so that cars driving south on route 28 actually can see our stand before they've gone past it! (I'm dying to hear what kind of rent increase our landlord tries to extract from us next year for all of his "improvements"...)

As to changes for next year, our major plan for this winter is to learn enough about the soft serve business so that we can add some type of soft-serve product to our store. We lose a fair number of customers to the DQ down the street when they find out that we don't have soft serve, so we're planning to buy a small machine over the winter and to figure out what type of product to serve with it. Many people have asked if we could carry frozen custard, and that's a possibility, but again, we need to do some research at our annual convention to figure out what it takes to do so.

Whatever we add, we want to offer a better product than our competition, so we'll either have a custard or else a high-end soft serve product -- at least a 10% butterfat mix to stay in line with our premium ice cream.

We'd also like to purchase an ice cream cart that has a running water setup, so that we can really scoop ice cream, rather than just slush, at our off-site events, but we'll see if the bank account allows us to do that.

Katrina Donations

Feeling a little helpless watching the destruction that Hurricane Katrina inflicted on the New Orleans area, we decided to put out a collection jar to aid the relief efforts last weekend. In three days, we collected $140 in donations from our customers. I decided that we've had enough good fortune this summer related to the good weather we've experienced that the right thing to do was to send some to help out the victims, so Mad Maggie's matched the money in the donation jar, and this morning I sent a check for $280 to the American Red Cross.

I'm sure the donation jar affected my staff's tips for those nights, but I didn't hear a peep from them, so I'm sure they were happy to see the donations pour in to help those in need.

I still feel helpless seeing how many people's lives have been affected by this, but hopefully our tiny donation will help. Thanks very much to all of you who dropped your change into the donation jar over the weekend!

Ice Cream Radio

Well, after sending out the reminder of the WRKO Ice Cream Show on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, I completely forgot to tune into the show myself! I was at the store all morning too, probably listening to some silly Classic Rock station at the time!

We heard from several customers though that they had listened, and that we had been mentioned a few times, which is flattering. We also had a rash of new customers who told us that they first heard of us from that show, so it's nice to hear that folks thought enough of our stand to call in and talk about us.

If you're one of those who called, thanks, we appreciate it!

Customer Stories

A few interesting customer interactions that we've had over the past couple of weeks: - A young boy came to the window and ordered an ice cream, and his mom told us that they had learned of us due to one of his school classes on learning to use the Internet. The assignment was to find directions from their home to a specific location, and the location the teacher gave them was Mad Maggie's Ice Cream! Nice to hear that we're becoming known to the teachers! Unfortunately, we didn't get the name of school or class, otherwise we probably would have sent them a free sundae party as a surprise! - Our Pumpkin Gingersnap ice cream is a Fall hit. Last night at the store, I scooped it for six consecutive customers! One couple was especially impressed: They came to the window, he got Pumpkin Gingersnap, she ordered Banana Pudding. Shortly, having tasted his cone, she returned for a kiddie cone of PG for herself! Then a short while later, both of them were back at the window for a pint to take home! I'll have to tell my mom that her pumpkin pie recipe is a big hit with the customers! - One woman came to the counter on Saturday, and ordered a Double Dark Chocolate cone. She had an accent that reminded me of my cousins up in Plattsburgh, New York, and I asked her where she was from, and sure enough, she was from the Burlington, Vermont area, just across Lake Champlain from my relatives. We got to talking, and she told me that she had worked for 15 years at Ben & Jerry's, and confessed that she thought that our Double Dark Chocolate was better than theirs! A nice compliment, as B&J's makes a pretty good product for supermarket ice cream!

Staff Profile

This week's newsletter profiles team member Janae.

Janae was the last of our "Class of 2004" hires, and I nearly didn't hire her as by the time she was out of school and ready to work, we had a rather full crew and I doubted we needed another team member. When her dad told me that she "loves to clean", I decided to give her a shot.

Boy, am I glad now that I relented and gave her a chance, as Janae is now a key member of our team. And her dad was right -- she's a great cleaner!

Janae attends Greater Lawrence Vocational School, where she's involved in the fashion design program and is entering her Junior year. She has the unusual extracurricular activity of participating on the *boys* wrestling team, so I get to joke with the boys on our team that they need to toe the line, or else I'll have Janae take care of them! She's also playing on the soccer team this fall, so I get to listen to her complain about how tough it is to keep up with school, sports, and work.

Late last year Janae approached me about learning how to make ice cream, and she's slowly been coming up to speed over the last few months. She's now at the point where she can make most of our flavors, and is surprisingly quick -- I left her with a list of a half dozen flavors to work on one day, and came back expecting her to have them half complete, and was surprised to find her on the final batch!

Here's a shot of Janae from earlier this year:

Make sure you say hi to her if you see her at the window!

Newsletter Coupon

The newsletter coupon for this week is the same as for everyone else -- buy one, get one on all pints, quarts, and half gallons. Still, we like to give preference to our newsletter readers, so print this out, bring it to the store, and we'll give you the BOGO offer now, before the rest of the riff-raff clean out all of the good flavors!

Gotta run -- plenty of things to do to get ready to close down for the winter! Make sure to stop by before the end of the month to grab some ice cream and to say "so long" until the spring!