Howdy folks, and welcome to this week's edition of The Scoop. The newsletter recommended by four out of five dentists. (That fifth guy is a real jerk!)

Things are slowing down at the store, as the kids are back to school, the sun is setting earlier, and the temperatures are gradually cooling. We've gone from scheduling five or six kids for a night shift down to two or three on most nights. It's a little sad to see our staff dwindling, as we've had to eliminate shifts for one or two of them altogether, as we just don't have the hours available anymore.

The weather over the summer was very disappointing to us. As those of you who regularly read this newsletter know, we in the ice cream business spend about half of the year waiting and planning for the business we'll do in the other half. So when a summer like this past one hits, it's a big set back for us as we know that we have to hunker down and endure another slow offseason before we have the chance to rebound with better sales.

Education

We're already into winter planning mode though, and attending offseason trade shows and conventions to try to learn better ways to grow our business. Last weekend, we travelled to Atlantic City for the annual SIGEP-USA show.

SIGEP is one of the biggest shows in Europe, held in Rimini, Italy each February. In the industry, the Rimini show is spoken of in legendary terms, as it's reportedly the largest trade show in the world for the frozen dessert business. From what I've heard from others who've attended it, the show is held in 6 huge buildings, each of which is roughly the size of our new convention center here in Boston. Supposedly, seeing all of the Rimini show takes the better part of three days!

SIGEP-USA wasn't anywhere near that big, there were maybe a couple of dozen ice cream (mostly gelato) suppliers in attendance. And Atlantic City is no where near as glamorous as Italy. This is my first real visit to Atlantic City, and I've found myself describing it to friends as "all of the sleaze of Las Vegas, without any of the elegance."

We picked up one or two tips though, and made contacts with a couple of new potential suppliers, so it wasn't a complete waste of a weekend.

We also have plans to attend the New England Ice Cream Restaurant Association's annual convention in Providence next month, as well as the Great Lakes Ice Cream and Fast Food Association's convention in lovely (cough, cough) downtown Lansing, Michigan in February. Why one of these organizations can't hold their annual conventions in Florida or somewhere else warm in the winter is beyond me!

Ice Cream Cakes

I wrote about our ice cream cakes a few months back, but now that the season is gearing down, and the lines at the window are getting shorter, I figure it's a great time to remind folks that we have the best cakes around for your fall and winter celebrations.

We have a "dream" team of cake decorators at this point, as Carolyn, Sara, Rachel, and Lisa all take turns cranking out dynamite looking cakes. I used to be a bit embarrassed to compare the decorations on our cakes to those you see in the supermarket, as ours always looked a little amatuerish alongside the "professionally" decorated cakes. Now though, I'll put our cakes up against anyone's, as our decorating team really does an amazing job of making our cakes look fantastic.

The cakes you'll find at Carvel or in the supermarket case are typically made with either soft serve ice cream (a 5% butterfat product), or with the cheapest brand of ice cream. Our cakes are made with our rich, delicious ultra-premium ice cream. And at the supermarket, you normally get your choice of any flavor you want -- as long as you want chocolate and vanilla! With a Mad Maggie's cake, you can choose just about any of our delicious ice cream flavors, so you can mix and match to get exactly the combination you want. (We need a couple of days notice to do custom flavors, as we need the time to make the ice cream, pack it into cake molds, freeze it overnight, then decorate it.)

So although the price is similar, you're getting a much better product with ours, and I'm 100% confident that we have the best cakes in the area.

We still get requests from people calling at 9:00 at night, looking for a custom flavored cake to pick up the next morning. We find ourselves continuously explaining to people that (a) we're not at the store 24 hours a day, we actually try to go home and sleep at night, and (b) that we can't modify the laws of thermodynamics and force the ice cream to freeze any faster. Some people understand, some people get exasperated when we tell them that we can't freeze and decorate a cake in an hour. And some seem surprised when we tell them that "no, we don't happen to have a premade cake with a layer of Pistachio and a layer of Mint Chip, together"!

I spent a bit of time last month putting together a web page describing our ice cream cakes, and it includes a nice photo gallery of some of the beautiful cakes our team has produced over the summer. If you're interested in seeing some of designs, check them out at

http://madmaggies.com/cakes

If you see something you like, ask us to make one just like it for your next special event!

Girl Scout Promotion

We're still beating the life out of our "Girl Scout Cookie" fiasco of last February. For those who missed the story, we put an offer on our website offering to buy Thin Mints from any scout who wanted to sell them to us. After a flurry of emails spreading our offer to all of the troops in the area, we found ourselves committed to buying over 300 boxes of cookies!

We turned the unexpected response into a promotional event, inviting the scouts to the store for a "Cookie Kickoff" party, and ended up getting a story on the front page of the Lawrence Eagle Tribune.

To try to wring a little more life out of the story, I wrote up a description of it and how we reacted to the response and submitted it to the New England Ice Cream Restaurant Association's "Promotion of the Year" competition.

While a lot of ice cream places do a similar promotion, I think the way we used email and the internet to spread our offer, and the way we adjusted to a higher-than-expected response was interesting enough to justify the submission, as I'm sure hearing of our experience will help other shop owners. And who knows, maybe we'll even win an award!

We plan to do the same type of promotion next February, but with a few modifications. First, we'll only commit to ONE box of cookies per scout if they want to sign us up via an email. BUT we'll buy two boxes if they come to the store to sign us up -- hopefully buying an ice cream or two! And we'll buy FOUR boxes if they'll agree to take payment in the form of Mad Maggie's gift cards. Hopefully, a good deal for them, as well as a good deal for us, as any method of getting bodies into the store in the dead of winter is a good thing for us!

Off Season Plans

A lot of customers have been asking about our plans for the fall and winter. So here's what we're thinking.

Last year, our first operating a store through the winter, I had what turned out to be some unrealistic ideas of what type of demand there would be from ice cream lovers during the colder months. There were plenty of days in December and January where I'd sit in the store alone at night, serving a dozen or so customers over the course of a couple of hours -- definitely not worth the effort!

Some of that was planned, as I really wanted to see exactly what type of business we could do in the winter. But now that we've seen it, I don't feel any huge need to stay open as much as we did last year. (Our entire sales for January of last year were eclipsed by the first 4 days of July this summer!)

Our plans are to operate with somewhat "normal" hours, noon to 9pm or so every day until the weather starts getting cold -- likely around Columbus Day (Oct 13th this year.) After that, we'll likely start opening at 2:30 on weekdays, and still closing at 9pm. After Thanksgiving, we'll roll our hours back so that we're closed completely on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, and only open from 1 until 9pm on weekends.

It's very likely that we'll close completely for the last two weeks of January, reopening on the weekend just before the schools let out for February vacation. After that, we'll likely slowly work on extending our hours, hopefully opening every day of the week again in March (hoping for an early spring!)

It seems odd to already be thinking about spring, as it seems like just yesterday when we were doing our spring cleaning, welcoming back our spring crew, and looking forward to the summer. After the terrible summer weather we had this year, I sure hope that next year is better than this one was!

Flavor News

This is the time of year when, rather than adding new flavors, we're slowing allowing some of our flavors to run out. It's next to impossible to keep the 50 or so flavors we offer during the summer in stock and as fresh as we want them to be when sales slow to offseason levels. So we don't really try to keep them all in stock.

We'll spend the winter patiently explaining to people that "Orange Pineapple won't be in stock until next spring!" Some people understand, some get rather cranky, but we try our best to offer an assortment through the winter that's likely to keep most people satisfied.

We will be doing a few seasonal flavors throughout the fall and winter though, so watch for Cranberry Sorbet, Egg Nog, Gingerbread, GroundHog Stew, and maybe even one or two surprises through the winter.

We normally "brew" a couple of batches of our Guinness flavor this time of year too. But this year, we've been asked to try a similar flavor using Sam Adams' "Cream Stout", so we've been playing with that a bit as well. Watch for that flavor, at least in a test batch, soon!

And, of course, we'll be rolling out our good old "Thin Mint" flavor in February when the Girl Scout cookies come in, along with our new "Coconut Caramel Cookie" flavor, that was such a hit for the short time we had the Caramel D'Lite cookies in stock!

Staff News

Our staff is slowly dwindling, as the available shifts become fewer and fewer. We hate seeing "our" kids drifting away for the off season, but many of them are involved in school sports, drama, dance, or just school work. So we understand that they have a lot of commitments, and frankly it's good that they do, as we just don't have the traffic at the store to give them all a ton of hours.

On the positive side, we're already looking forward to our spring hiring season. Our current crew is very "Senior heavy", as we had a very strong group of rising juniors in 2007, so we currently have a dozen or so seniors on our team. Looking forward to this time of the year in 2009, I'm a little worried about the massive exodus we'll have as this group heads off to college.

So, we're currently keeping our eyes open for the next wave of hires -- hopefully kids who are in their freshman or sophomore years in high school this year. We have four younger kids on the team already, with Siobhan, Shannon, Angie, and our favorite "brat", Brittany all showing that they're going to make a great group of future leaders for us. And we've started to groom Carolyn's "little brother", Joe, as a future team member, as he currently comes in on the weekends to help keep the store clean and organized. But I know that we need to add at least five or so new team members in the spring.

So, if you know of any bright, hardworking, trustworthy youngsters who are in their freshman or sophomore years, encourage them to apply for one of our spots! I'd love to find a handful that we could bring in for an occasional shift this fall & winter, with the idea of having them fully trained and ready to go for the spring.

There really aren't many jobs around that will hire 14 or 15 year olds, so I like to think we have a bit of an advantage, as we get to hire the very best from that age group, then sit back and watch them grow from awkward, clumsy "rookies" into polished, mature young adults.

We only hire the most polite, bubbly, outgoing personalities though, so if you know a young teen who you think will flourish in a job where they have to interact with customers a lot, send them our way!

Newsletter Coupon

Here's the deal: Come to the window, tell whichever serving team member waits on you that you challenge them to a "Rock, Paper, Scissors" contest. Best two out of three!

If you win, we'll give you a free waffle cone upgrade on your order -- we'll even toss in free sprinkles!

If they win, you have to either do "The Funky Chicken" dance, sing a verse of your favorite song (NO Stevie Nicks songs, please), or drop a quarter in their tip jar (Hey, I have to give my serving team some type of incentive to actualy win...!)

Newsletter Schedule

I've found it a lot harder to get a newsletter together on my promised "every two weeks or so" schedule over the summer, so there's one thing that makes the off season a little bit welcome -- I won't promise to send these out any more than once a month! From now until the spring, I'll try to stick to roughly that schedule, hopefully picking up on a more regular basis as the winter starts to fade.

If you have questions about the store, feel free to email me anytime though -- I normally respond to emails very quickly!

Thanks for reading, and please come on by the store for some late season goodness while we still have some warm fall days ahead!