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Coolers and the Next Step

Good morning folks. Thank you all for the feedback on the issue of LPO going to coolers. It is a huge help to get feedback (hopefully honest) from the members who it would be affecting.

Here are a couple of points in clarification though. Uno, this step would ONLY affect the home delivery members. Our U-Pack members at the farm, Page One, and Carlisle store would never have to use the coolers.

Well, unless you wanted to buy a super sexy cooler with an LPO logo on it.
And unfortunately, we would not be able to use it for our location pick up members either due to spatial constraints from our pick up locations, as well as tracking who’s cooler is who’s at those locations. Our pick up locations already do us a huge favor by letting us take over part of their stores for the CSA pick up. Asking them to hold a stack of 40 coolers for the entire week is too much.

Also, it would be a feat no smaller than the building of the Panama canal to try and track who returned their coolers and who did not. Labels fall off coolers easily and for job security reasons, I cannot have our CSA manager, Becca, trying to debate with a member if they did or didn’t return the coveted (sexy) LPO cooler. So I hope you all understand the logistics behind that limitation.

Here is the big move for LPO though. And again this is a little peek behind the LPO curtain. Unless that is a creepy metaphor. In which case use your own Wizard of Oz reference that does not give you the willies.

Here goes….basically in my glorious off-season I have been studying routes, shopping patterns, and how far the average U.S. Joe (or Monte) drives to get to the grocery store. And what I have learned has propelled the next stage(s) of LPO.

Did you know that the average person drives 20 minutes roundtrip to get their shopping done? And to be honest with you, I bet it is more for folks like us who drive a little further to get natural/Organic foods. So here is what hit me, home delivery is probably the most environmentally friendly thing that LPO can do. Well, besides growing ridiculously tasty local food.

Again, to show you my tender furry underbelly...I thought that home delivery was a “luxury” when we started it 6 years ago. I thought that it was a convenient way to get our food to members, but I never looked at it as a “green practice” that we did as a company. Probably because I was always seeing the gas used (and paying for it) on our end. But I never saw savings.

Now back to our 20-minute-commuter. Since I passed the third grade the second time, I know that 20 minute commutes equate to 3 folks per hour can get their groceries. Ok. But then it hit me that our drivers are doing 8-9 deliveries an hour! What? Wait. No. It couldn’t be. Is LPO home deliveries actually 3 times more efficient than all of us driving to our stores? Yup, it is.

So now picture that little compact fluorescent going off in my head. (it only takes 1/3 the brain power to light up) Bing! Well how do we make our delivery service of the CSA even better? And the answer is easy my amigos, higher density of delivers per square mile. Makes sense. Drive a block rather than a mile in between deliveries and you are more efficient. Ok….

So how do we get more home deliveries. A) advertise the heck out of it (which I can do to the point of nausea) and B) lower the price of delivery to make it more enticing to members.

“But Farmer M., you will lose money if you lower the price. The horror, The horror.”

Well, not if more folks use it. Then we would be getting the same amount of money gross then we did when we had less folks and a higher delivery charge. And really, I am not trying to retire at age 40 on the delivery charge. I just want it to cover the cost of running the vans.

There it is folks. There is the master plan of LPO version 20.10. Educate folks that you can be as green as Kermit the Frog, and still feel like you are being pampered. So don’t feel guilty. We are working out logistics on this to lower the delivery fee be this spring, but the coolers are a huge piece in the puzzle. So that’s how it all fits.

Happy grazing, Farmer Monte