Edwin Pawlowski wrote:

> The extra money I'm spending on fuel and heating has to come from
> cutting back in other areas. Some of that will be the occasional
> meal out.

Yeah, I'm certain it will play out that way for our customers. They are
very loyal, but something has to get cut in family budgets. And of course
they way to make up for a fall-off of repeat customers is to increase new
customer growth. But that has been tough for us to do.

We are able to capture data of customer visits with our point-of-sale
system. We currently see roughly 93% of our customers return. They
re-visit us an average of once every 3.25 weeks. Of course that means I'll
see some customers once every week, and others maybe once a quarter. But we
don't lose 'em once we have them. Our problem is increasing the number of
daily new customer visits.

Those of you that have been to the store know how far out of the way it is
from the main traffic flow in Wenatchee. I thought that we could make up
for our location by word-of-mouth along with heavy advertising. To date
(11.5 months) we have spent over $19K in various advertising media. There
have been results, but it has been anemic. We had 20K allocated for our ad
budget for the first year. Next year, we will be relying on other methods
of getting the word out, and spending a lot less on formal advertising.

If I had it to do again, I would have tried to raise more capital so that we
could've built closer to the main traffic lanes. I was wrongly convinced
that a smaller community would be quick to find out about us in a more
out-of-the-way location. So, the challenge continues.