buy local, but be nice about it.

For the past two summers, I have been a vendor at the local farmer's market. Not being a farmer, I don't sell anything that grows on a plant but instead I bake all summer in the hot, sweaty heat and sell scones and banana bread and coffee in the wee early hours of Saturday mornings. This has proved to be rewarding in that it's something I do myself instead of being paid by the hour by someone else, and it feels community-like which helped a lot when I was newer here, and also because it is a nice chunk of my income. HOWEVER, toward the end of last summer I noticed that I dreaded actually sitting at the market selling, and that I griped about it constantly which I'm sure was getting old to Nate. Why is this? I'll tell you, in an attempt to express my frustrations in a preemptive manner this year and try not to complain about it at all this summer.
I think the concept of "the customer is always right" has damaged the ability of the public to see anyone remotely connected to selling as a normal human being with limitations. Since I'm not only in school but also have a regular job, I only really have one day a week to devote to baking and I spend the entire day doing just that. This, however, has not stopped ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE from coming up with an unsolicited list of requests for what else I should bake for them. They want cookies, cinnamon rolls, and bread, and they want several flavors of coffee, they all want it to be free trade whether or not I could make money off of that, they want skim milk, 2% milk, whole milk, half&half AND cream to choose from for their myriad of coffees, and they're ANGRY about it. They're entitled to this! They want at least three kinds of iced tea. They want lids and straws, forks and napkins, an available trash can. They want different packaging. They expect everything to be low-fat and low-calorie (as well as delicious), organic and oh, don't you have anything vegan? This very morning, with over a month until the next market begins, I received a request BY EMAIL that if I'm going to be at the farmer's market this year, could I please make homemade new york style bagels and also those big pretzels WITH DRIED FRUIT IN THEM like they have in some farmer's market in California? Do they have any concept of how long that would take? This all too much for me. I don't have some business somewhere with a commercial kitchen and a staff of eight people. I have eight hours on Friday in which I mix, bake and wrap 130 scones and 18 slices of banana bread. I have never promised more, nor have I asked how I can improve. What I and my little business are saying to the public is: Here's this, buy it if you want. That's all. I'm grateful for my customers (and some of them genuinely are pleasant and enjoyable and I look forward to seeing them), but on the other hand I'm selling them really good stuff, so I don't feel as if I owe them anything.
I don't see anyone telling the real farmers, "wow these are really nice eggplant. You know what you should do? You should really grow some corn next year. That would be great." I don't see anyone telling the guy who sells sausage biscuits that he needs to add veggie burgers. I'm bitter, it's true. The point that the public doesn't seem to recognize in all of this is that as a vendor, I have to make what I can sell enough of to make enough profit for it to be worth the time that goes into it. There's a delicate balance to be maintained, and no, I can't do it by selling cookies at 30 cents each. But thanks for the idea.