Welcome to this week's edition of Mad Maggie's Email newsletter -- the newsletter read and savored by the world's most beautiful people (you know who you are...)

The end of the ice cream season is fast approaching, as we have only a week or so left. As the dog said, after the lawn mower ran over his tail: "It won't be long now..."

Well, things have gotten "difficult" at the store these past couple of weeks. Normally at this time of year I have kids fighting over shifts, as in past years we've had too many scoop team members and limited shifts with the lower sales levels.

For some reason, this year we have the opposite problem -- it seems like an unusually large percentage of my serving team have found other jobs for the winter, or have sports commitments, or have school work or social commitments, and I've really had to scramble to get someone at the store each day to open.

Even the nights have been tough, as I've had to jump in and lend a hand at the serving window on several nights. (The kids I end up working beside have learned to watch out when I'm working the window with them, otherwise they'll go home with sore feet from me stepping on them!)

We've adjusted our weekday hours so that we now open at 2:30 each day, which gives me at least a slight chance of getting one or two of our high school kids there to open. Still, we've had a few miscommunications over the past week or so, and not opened until after 3pm. If you're one of those who were at the store in the afternoon and we weren't open when we should have been, sorry about that! We're trying hard, but it's tough to keep things running smoothly at this time of year.

Pint for a Pint Promotion

As I wrote about in the last newsletter, we participated in the blood drive sponsored by St. Theresa's church in North Reading on September 7th. I printed out 90 certificates for free pints and all but one were given out to people donating a pint of blood.

While we're happy that we might have helped to attract some new donors, I was a bit disappointed with the way our donation was promoted. I had a 5pm appointment to give blood, and decided to keep my role in the ice cream giveaway to myself to see how the drive organizers used it. I donated my pint, sat at the refreshment table, and got up to leave without anyone ever mentioning the pint certificates.

After walking outside, I decided to walk back in and find out what had happened to the certificates, and was told by the volunteer manning the registration desk "Oh yeah, there are some certificates over there on the table -- take one if you want."

That certainly wasn't the response I expected, as now I'm not sure if the people redeeming those certificates are actual donors, or just people who happened to wander by and help themselves to a certificate. I'll have to give some thought over the winter as to whether continuing to offer this type of support has any benefit -- either to us, or to the Red Cross.

If any of you newsletter readers have feedback on this, I'd love to hear from you!

Saturday, In the Park

We scooped at an event in the park in Andover on Saturday, September 9th for a gathering organized by the Christ Church. While I was initially skeptical that this would be a good event for us, it couldn't have turned out better, as the weather was spectacular, and there was a large crowd of people and we were busy all afternoon scooping ice cream and slush.

One of the funny moments from the day: During one of the musical presentations, a group performed the song "Saturday", originally done by the group Chicago. One of the verses of the song goes:

Saturday in the park,
I think it was the Fourth of July
People dancing, people laughing,
A man selling ice cream...

At that point in the song, I looked up from scooping and noticed a bunch of people looking over and pointing at me and my youngest son, David, and smiling. I told David "that's our line of the song!" David got a kick out of it -- he gave me a knuckle tap and a big grin!

Other Events

We have two remaining events planned for this year:

• On Friday, September 22nd, we'll be in Andover scooping at St. Augustine's Fall Ice Cream Social. We've done this for the past 3 years, and it's always a fun event, with lots of people.
• Buddy Walk for Down Syndrome - For the third year in a row, we'll be scooping slush and ice cream on the common near the bandstand on Lake Quannapowitt in Wakefield. The date of the event is October 8th, and we'll be there all afternoon, starting at 1pm.

Make sure to stop by and say hi if you happen to be at one of these!

State of the Business

As most of you know, this business is really just a hobby for me. We don't make much money at it, and in fact it's been a money loser for most of our four years of operation. The fun of running a small business, of meeting lots of interesting people, of working with the kids on my serving team, and the promise that maybe we're building something that could end up being a moneymaker in the future helps to make up for the fact that I'm basically giving up summers for free.

Still, I need to be able to at least cover my expenses, and this year that's going to be a difficult mark to hit, as the early season rains, and the cool June and early July really put a dent in our sales. Even the hot period of late July wasn't good -- it was too hot! People don't come out for ice cream when it's 95 degrees out, they just stay home in their air conditioning or beside the pool.

It takes a fair amount of cash in the bank just to get through the winter, even though we're not open. There are still rental fees to be paid for storing our equipment, phone charges, and payroll services to be done, as well as the annual tax preparation fees. To make things interesting, our wonderful state of Massachusetts hits all registered corporations with a $456 "excise tax" each February -- that one really bugs me.

So all in all, this has been a trying year, and there's definitely the possibility that it could be our last. While I love the store, and for the most part really enjoy running it, the strain of keeping it going all by myself is just too large for it to make sense without making at least a modest profit.

I've been spending quite a bit of time thinking about the business in the past couple of weeks, and I've pretty much come to the conclusion that there's no way for us to ever be profitable at our existing location -- the landlord wants too much in rent, the location just doesn't have the visibility needed to draw in enough new customers to make it successful, and we get just about no "accidental" traffic to supplement those customers who come out specifically because they know we're there. Heck, even if we could bring in twice the amount of customers we do now, I'm not even sure we could handle that volume with the lousy layout of the store and the limited storage space we have.

So the possibility exists that I just move all of the equipment into my garage, and take the next year off while I look for a better location where we could actually stand a chance to become profitable. As much as I'd love to move into the downtown Andover area, that's a remote possibility, given the limited spaces available and the astronomical rents there. (I recently looked at a space in Winchester -- a community with a similar demographic to Andover's and with a much more vibrant downtown, and the rent there was nearly half of what a comparable space in downtown Andover would go for...) And North Reading really doesn't have the type of centralized downtown location where we'd get the foot traffic needed to support the store.

The other possibility is that I give up some of my duties in running the store, so that I'm not spending all of my waking hours keeping the place running. A couple of my older college kids have approached me with the idea of them maybe taking on more responsibility for running the store, in exchange for a "piece of the action", assuming the store makes a profit. I'm not quite sure how this would work out, but I'm going to discuss the idea with some of my "ice cream buddies" during the off season and see if maybe we can structure some type of cooperative that makes sense to all of us.

Heck, maybe we'll end up with a little hippie ice cream cooperative -- we can get tie-dyed t-shirts for our staff shirts, burn a lot of incense at the store, grow our hair out long, and purchase a used '72 Volkswagen bus to use to transport our ice cream to events...

End of the Season Clearance

As I wrote in the last edition of the newsletter, we'll still be having some type of final clearance, but it's likely to be less extensive than in past years. We're at the point where we'll only make a couple of batches of ice cream for the rest of the month, and just let the current stock run out. Depending upon how brisk business is over this next week, we'll either have a lot of flavors or just a few, so the longer you wait, the less likely we'll have the flavor you want available on discount.

Here's how I'm planning to run things this year: Starting Friday, September 22nd, we'll knock 25% off any hand packed pints or quarts. On Sunday night starting at 5pm, any remaining flavors will be sold on a BOGO offer: Buy one, Get One free! (BOGO applies to handpacked pints, quarts, or half gallons only -- not to individually scooped servings.)

If by some chance we run out of ice cream before Friday, we'll close down early, but it's likely we'll have at least something left for that weekend, though again, selection may be limited.

Flavor News

At this point, we've pretty much stopped making all flavors other than a few basics -- don't want to run out of Vanilla, Chocolate, Cookie Dough, or Oreo! So there's not a lot of flavor news to report.

Our final two "Flavor of the Week" entries, Guinness and Chili Chocolate, are still in stock as of this writing, but when they're gone, they're gone, so if you like these, come and get 'em soon!

We also have a little bit of fresh fruit sorbets still in stock, and again, those are probably the last of those for the season.

Since we really don't have any flavor news, I thought I'd toss in this next section:

Steve's Favorites

We make somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 different flavors of ice cream and sorbet throughout the summer. There are about 40 of these that are just about always in stock, and I like to rotate different flavors into the mix often to keep a nice variety available.

Many of the folks who come to the store ask me to recommend a flavor for them. While I like to think that all of our flavors are good, I definitely have my group of favorites that I really believe are better than what you'll find at any other store around. These are the ones that I go for when I'm in the mood to take a break, go outside on the picnic tables, and sit down with an ice cream cone (roughly in reverse order of my favorites):

• Black Raspberry -- I've always loved this flavor, and when I started making ice cream, I wanted to make a great black raspberry flavor, something better than the weakly flavored versions that you'll find at many of the local stands. After lots of experimenting during our first couple of seasons, I ended up using three different black raspberry flavorings to get the right taste.
• Peppermint Stick -- When I was a kid, this was my flavor. I can remember my parents bringing us to an ice cream stand in Wakefield where they made a great peppermint stick with big hunks of green and red peppermint candy in it. We used to compete to see who could find the biggest hunk in their cone. I think our version of this is pretty close to what I remember as a kid. (Peppermint Stick on a Brownie Sundae with lots of hot fudge is just a decadent combination!)
• Coffee Oreo -- I love coffee ice cream, and the combination of of the coffee flavor with the chocolate of the oreos is just perfect for me. I pack a few pints of this each fall to stash in my home freezer for those Saturday nights in January when we're sitting around watching movies.
• Pumpkin Gingersnap -- A friend originally shared his recipe for this one with me, but I just didn't like it -- I kept thinking that it wasn't as good as my Mom's pumpkin pie. So I adapted Mom's recipe to ice cream, and now I think this flavor is just perfect. I have one customer who tells me that he thinks that this is the best flavor of ice cream he's ever tasted anywhere!
• Big City Brownie -- While I'm not a huge chocolate lover, I love this flavor. I originally made this using pre-cut "brownie pieces", which are easy to get, but aren't really brownies. Now I make this using hand cut pieces of the same fudgey brownies we use to make our brownie sundaes, and they're wonderful. The complement of the walnuts to the chocolate really makes this for me!
• Maple Walnut -- I know it's an "old folks" flavor, but I still love it! Friends Patty and Gary Sundberg, of Island Ice Cream in Vermont convinced me to use real Vermont maple syrup (harvested by a neighbor of theirs...) to make this flavor, and they were dead on in saying that it makes a huge difference. I'll put our Maple Walnut up against anyone's, it's that good!
• Massachusetts Mud -- This is one of the first "specialty" flavors I came up with, and I still think it's our best. I use the freshest almonds I can find, and the combination of coffee cinnamon, almonds, caramel, and oreos just works perfectly for me!

Staff Profile

The final member of our staff to be featured this season is Sara, who's our newest member of the serving team. I was looking to add one more member to our team in early August to help fill in for the kids heading off to college. I'd had a few applicants, but all were either too young (under 16 can't work past 7pm once school starts) or too transparent (I had a couple of older boys apply who obviously only wanted to work there because of some of the cute girls working the windows when they came to the stand ;^)

Literally minutes after taking the "Help Wanted" sign out of our window, after making the decision to make do by hiring one of the younger kids who had applied, I got a phone call from Sara, who had applied earlier in the summer. I recognized her name, but for some reason I had mis-filed her application. She was over 16, and sounded very confident on the phone, so I had her come down to the store and hired her immediately.

Sara is our lone Wilmington resident on the team, but has fit in wonderfully with the rest of the crew. She's picked things up very quickly and done a great job of helping us to fill our late-summer shifts. She has a very pleasant personality, and is a dynamo in getting things done when it's time to clean up at the end of the night.

Sara attends Austin Prep in Reading, and is a member of the Volleyball team. She's one of the few tall members of the team, so I get to kid her about being the one who gets to grab things down from the high shelves when we're restocking. She also seems to be a very popular young lady, as there seems to be no end of friends of hers coming by the stand to have her wait on them on the nights when she's there.

Here's a link to a shot of Sara.

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

Newsletter Coupon

Here's a little headstart on our end-of-the-season clearance sale for our loyal newsletter readers: Bring this to the store, and we'll give you an early BOGO offer on hand packed pints. Pay for one pint, and we'll give you the second for a smile. Or pay for a pint and get a full quart. (You still have to give us a smile...)

OK, that's it for this final in-season newsletter. I'll try to send out one final update after we've finished closing down, then I'll leave you in peace for the winter, with just one or two planned updates during the cold months.

Thanks for reading!