General Managers’ Report 12/18/08

Winter weather woes: varying weather patterns always make for a challenging day, operationally speaking. And every year we find more and more spaces within the store that are not air-tight and leaking in those cold ocean winds. We’re in the process of trying to find a source of heat for the receiving room. The Kienow’s have re-routed some of our heating ducts in order to direct heat into the re-pack area. We’re also looking into some possibilities for sealing up the receiving room garage door, which has huge air gaps in between the panels. The partition between the receiving room and the re-pack area is working as planned, to keep what little heat is in the back offices from dissipating into the much colder receiving area. Once these slushy snow storms start, our evening maintenance crew wears out pretty quickly, and floor managers spend the bulk of our shifts shoveling the walks and mopping the floors. During the huge windstorm just before Thanksgiving, we lost power for a few hours, but all the turkeys remained at proper refrigeration temps until the power came back on, thank goodness.

We are nearing our goal of eliminating 21 hours of labor from our permanent schedule in order to help alleviate the winter sales slowdown—we’ve removed 17.5 hours so far, and we are still waiting to hear the proposed changes to the deli's schedule. Some staff have stepped up to cross-train in other departments as part of the effort, and we have been able to fill all open shifts by moving our existing staff around to provide coverage. On the other side, we’re encouraging all Department Managers to get whatever deals they can to help us save on Cost of Goods. And don’t forget to mark your calendars, as new winter hours on Sundays start January 4^th. We’ll be opening from 9-6 on that day. Please also be aware of our early closing on X-mas eve at 6pm.

The peanut committee has officially disbanded, as most of you know. What we’ve learned as a GMT is that we need to have a more formalized process and clear guidelines for dealing with specific member requests regarding our merchandising and purchasing of products, in order to help us avoid going down this road of divisiveness once again. And the need grows more urgent, as we start to hear from more members that they want us to get rid of this product and that product because it contains ingredient X, or is sourced from country Y. Our hope is that the purchasing committee will help us take up this torch. Masks and gloves are currently available at the customer service area for customers suffering from food allergies.

On a hugely positive note, we’ve been contacted by a “cookbook compositor” who would like to be involved in helping us put together a co-op cookbook. Fran and Erica are debating about whether or not this is a project we can take on at this time, and what direction the book should take, in order to tie it into what the co-op wants to be for the community at the moment: a resource for local foods? A resource for healthy foods? A resource for vegetarian foods? What do you all think?

We had our annual holiday party the weekend of the 6^th, filled with lots of great food, awesome door prizes, and many little ones running around. 45 staff members were in attendance, and a few invited vendors showed up, including the Caldwell family and Nancy Crackers. Everyone says “Thanks for the bonus!” Hope everyone has a happy holiday season.