Yes, I know it sounds weird that I spent my first weekend home from college selling goat cheese at a fair. It’s probably not the ideal way to spend a weekend, but I actually had a lot of fun. I was there with my cousins Cecylia, Cheyanne, and Christine, my brother Matt, my aunt Alice (the master behind the making of the goat cheese) and her assistant Jesse.
(So this will be a longer post than usually, so I’ll brief you about it a little. First I’ll be talking about my adventure in general and then I’ll be listing all of the different types of customers that we encountered. Both sections will have pictures so keep reading!)
A Day Selling Goat Cheese
The day started weird to begin with. When we got to the fair, there was a lot of boy scouts standing in the parking lot helping people park. They all had these big orange flags that they waved to show you where to go. There was this one guy who was really intent on showing me EXACTLY where to go. He was squatting and waving his arm so fast it was basically a blur. And he had this intense drill sergeant look on his face… it was slightly frightening.
Throughout the day, we had a steady flow of customers… except when Jesse would leave. We had 7 people. You would think that would be enough to allow one person to go on break at a time, and it usually was. But then Jesse would leave for a little while to grab lunch. It turned into chaos. We’d be sitting there dealing with the one customer we had and Jesse would be like “Well, it’s not very busy right now so I’m going to go grab lunch” and we’d all be like, “Yup that’s fine.” So he would get up to go, and all of the sudden, the ground would start to shake. There was a stampede coming. A stampede of hungry customers. As soon as Jesse left, we had about 30 people placing orders, and waving money at us, and asking really hard questions about the cheese. One question I got was something I had no idea how to answer. Lady, I don’t know what color the cheese would turn if you wanted to go scuba diving with it. Please make up your mind if you’re going to buy any or not because there are about 1,000 people behind you. After we were all frantically running around for 30 minutes, the crowd would die down and Jesse would return. No joke. And he’d say, “Oh good! Didn’t miss anything!” Yup. You definitely didn’t miss a thing.
At one point during the day this boy and his dad came up to try cheese. The boy was probably close to Cecylia’s age so naturally Cecylia’s mom was all about calling out how cute he was. Here’s how the conversation went…
Boy: (trying goat cheese) Mmmmm. This tastes like goat cheese!
Cecylia: That’s because it is goat cheese.
Boy: Oh, oopps haha!
Cecylia’s Mom: That’s okay! It’s easy to mess up around cute girls!
The boy’s face turned bright red and shortly after, he and his dad left without buying any cheese.
We dealt with many other customers throughout the day… all of which were characters, but I’ll get to that more later.
When Cecylia and I went on break for lunch, we were really thirsty, so we got these giant tubs of lemonade. And when I say “tubs”, I mean it. They were huge! And we got cheaper refills so it was awesome:)
We sat outside to eat and we started talking about the fair. The thing was… I had no idea where we were. It was like the middle of nowhere. In fact, just as Cecylia was saying, “Where ARE we?” we look over at the road and see this little old lady slowly walk by headed towards nothing in particular. And that about sums it up.
The Different Types of Toothpickers
Jesse and Christine worked at checkout dealing with money. Aunt Alice, Matt, and Cheyanne worked at filling orders and packaging them, and Cecylia and I worked with the customers and manned the free samples. Cecylia and I definitely had the most fun since we were dealing DIRECTLY with the customers. Let me tell you, we met some very big characters. It was a little frustrating at times. I never realized how many different varieties of cheese tasters there are. Like, there are A LOT of things you can do wrong when tasting cheese.
We had the sample station set up in a very simple way. Each type of cheese was in a different compartment and was labeled as to which flavor it was. Almost every cube of cheese also had a toothpick in it to make it easier for the customer and so we could follow the health standards. All the customer had to do was pick a toothpick that had the cheese they wanted on it, and eat it. Pretty easy. But somehow, the customers found a way to make it difficult. I’ve grouped the customers into different categories to explain it.
1) The eco-friendly customers- These customers will try to violate the health code rules by using the same toothpick more than once in hopes of saving toothpicks. Sorry, people. They aren’t our rules! You HAVE to use a different toothpick each time! Well, I’ll just flip it over. Nope. Well, I only touched one. Nope. Sorry. I’ll just put my toothpick back. No. That’s disgusting. I’ll just use my hands. That’s worse.
2) The sneak attackers- These people think that we don’t want them to take a sample so they wait until someone comes up and lifts off the lid to take one. Then, they sneak their hand in really fast, grab a piece, and run away from the table. You knooowww… they are FREE samples…
3) The person who takes so many samples that they might as well just buy a whole block of cheese.
4) The minefield dodger- Every piece of cheese has a toothpick already in it except on small one in the middle of the minefield of pointy toothpicks. THAT’S the piece they go for. I literally had one lady complaining that she kept getting stabbed by all the toothpicks when she was trying to get the small piece of cheese in the middle. Well, that’s why we put all the toothpicks there. We wanted to stab you as you went for the toothpickless piece in the middle… duh!
5) The double stabber- They find an empty toothpick and stab a piece of cheese that already has a toothpick in it… I don’t understand why having two toothpicks on your cheese is better than just one, but if it makes you happy.
6) The dream customer- This customers does everything right without being told anything. This customer also does not exist.
7) The wrong cheese picker- This customer either has never had the cheese, or has had the cheese and knows they don’t like it. If they’ve never had the cheese, they tend to take the strongest most intensely flavored goat cheese sample… bad idea. It usually scars them forever and they’ll never try another piece for the rest of their life. If they have had it and know they don’t like it, then they tend to take the biggest sample piece on the plate. They end up throwing it away because… what do you know! They don’t like it!
8) The trasher- This customer leaves their used toothpick or knife on the table instead of in the clearly marked trashcans next to them.
9) The joker- “The Gouda cheese is good.” Haha! Never heard that one before…
10) The guy who just doesn’t get it....
I may seem to come off as harsh explaining the customers, but in reality, I had a lot of fun selling goat cheese and secretly laughing at the different customers. It was an experience that I am definitely going to remember for a while!
