I owe so many of you an apology! I haven’t been very active lately and I now see that many of you asked about how my little honor-system produce stand worked out. Well, I’m an open book so I will just give you the exact numbers. I have no idea if these are big sales numbers or little ones, or whether my thefts were high or low by comparison. This is my first (somewhat) serious attempt to sell fruit. Overall I was very disappointed by the high rates of theft. I tried this just a little bit last year and had much less thievery. Then again, I did put a few hundred dollars in my pocket from apples that otherwise would have probably been wasted, so all told I guess I came out ok. ?
So, I sold all my apples for $8 per 1/2 peck bag. I sold 6 varieties over a period of about 2 months/9 weeks. Each bag was labeled with the variety name. I also sat out a little recipe sheet I made that had some good apple-related desert instructions, including the famous Smokey Mountain Apple Barn Apple Fritters. Almost everyone seemed to pick up a copy of these and I think they helped with sales.
So, I DISTRIBUTED a total of 72 bags of apples. That sounds great, but read on…
Out of the 72 bags of apples that were taken from the stand, I received $357 total. That means that I sold about 45 bags of apples, and had 27 bags STOLEN!!! Yes, that means they stole right about half as many as I sold!!! WOW!!! That is just astounding to me, and very disappointing. The numbers don’t work out evenly because people would often short me just a dollar or two, some would leave odd change, etc. In those cases I like to think they just didn’t have enough cash on hand.
There are lots of fun - well, INTERESTING- stories I can tell about the experience. Twice I had people people leave IOU notes (and both times they made good by putting the money in later with a note). I also had one customer who bought 9 bags at once and paid in full! I know this because I just happened to be passing by and I saw them grabbing almost all my bags. I stopped ready to be angry and call them accuse them of theft!. Thank goodness I didn’t accuse them of anything and they immediately said “we already put the money in the box” and they had. They were on their way to visit family in Florida and were taking the apples to them. I also enjoyed getting lots of compliments on the apples from many people who bought them and later told me how good they were.
On the stealing thing, there is one very important thing to note here. I am absolutely convinced that a substantial percentage of the thefts were from one house- which was DIRECTLY across the street and not 100 feet from my stand. It’s a house where about 10 adult males live in. Most don’t have jobs, the police are there all the time, and I literally saw two situations where I know people from that house stole apples from me. They were quite clever about it too. Here is how I caught them one of the times: I usually just kept 12 bags of apples on the stand at one time. They were all lined up neatly and spaced evenly, so it was very easy to spot when a bag was taken. Then I could look in the money box to see if it had been paid for or stolen. One day I drove by and all 12 bags were out there. I also noticed that one of the suspected thieves was about to cross the street going to my stand. So I kept driving by. I went down the road and turned around after about 4 minutes and went back. It was interesting what I saw. First, a bag was missing. But the thief, thinking he was clever, had brought a large shopping bag (a big paper one with handles) with him, so when he stole my bag of apples, he just put it inside his own bag so if I happened by I wouldn’t see him walking off with a big of my apples. Now, in 4 minutes time I knew my bag of apples had gone missing and no one else had been there, and here is this guy carrying a big bag that obviously had something in it (and I knew what!) but still, for what ever reason, I didn’t feel comfortable enough to stop and confront him. After all, for all I knew he could have put money in the box. Of course I checked later and found he didn’t. I guess many of you will say I should have confronted him or called the cops or whatever, and maybe I should have- but I didn’t. The point in me telling this story is that I had a few other situations involving people in that house (who are all known petty criminals) and I really think that house and their guests (they throw huge drinking parties every weekend and sometimes week nights) are why the theft rates are so high. The fact that this guy had thought about and developed a whole system for stealing that bag of apples (bringing his own bag, etc) makes me think they did this a lot.
I did not ever have money stolen. This year I nailed the cash box to the stand very well and kept a lock on it. Someone would have had to go to a fair amount of work to steal the box, and there are 2 other houses in plain view who likely would have seen or heard them trying to pry and hammer the cash box free from its place. Plus I emptied it 1-2 times a day.
One thing I did do after about a month and a half was to install an incredibly real looking camera, but it was fake. It had a flashing red light, it swept back and forth, started blinking when it detected motion, etc. I used fake one because it was super cheap AND because I thought it was likely that the thieves would steal or destroy the camera. This ABSOLUTELY made a substantial difference- thefts went down considerably.
OK, that is my full report for now. In spite of my disappointments, I made a few hundred bucks, got rid of my extra apples, and was overall somewhat pleased with the experience. Not sure if I’ll do it again next year but I might. I may put some real cameras out of reach or hidden if I do. I have some other ideas too. I’m happy to discuss further if anyone has questions. I think all of us with more than a few trees have considered at least a little honor stand like mine. Don’t be too discourage by my high theft rate- as I said, if it weren’t for the “House of criminals” I suspect it would be very low.
