The Dog Days of Summer

The challenges of high summer

August is typically a sales challenge for us. Stu-Boy’s serves only beverages — no food. Our primary sales venue is events and festivals, which are also challenging in a different way; they are usually expensive (vendor fees), but offset that by generally having high reward, i.e., high sales volume.

Conversely, with that high reward comes high risk; weather events can kill an event. Bad weather means no crowds, no crowds means no sales. An event that normally grosses $2,500 suddenly becomes a $250 event with all the hard overhead commensurate with the original sales projections. A bad weather event goes from a money maker to a money pit.

Back to August

Our event season usually runs from March to June, with sporadic events in July. August in eastern North Carolina is brutal. It’s hot! There are no national holidays. Nobody wants to run an event in the heat.

We do have the occasional small event in August, just not the 3,000-person crowd events of the spring.

Street vending, then, becomes an option — everybody eats lunch. The distraction is that we do not serve food, so we do not have the advantage of serving lunches. I want to make it clear, I’m not whining, simply explaining.

About the only thing we can do, short of starting to serve food, is to team-up and colocate with street food vendors. Working on it, but it may not happen until next year.