Holiday hours logistics

The basic plan

The Holiday Hours Plan is to pay three people for 8 hours per day (24 hours) each day, mostly on Sundays over the holiday season in 2008-2009.

Specifically, we would be open on:

• Nov 23 (Sun)
• Nov 28 (Fri)
• Nov 29 (Sat)
• Nov 30 (Sun)
• Dec 7 (Sun)
• Dec 14 (Sun)
• Dec 21 (Sun)
• Dec 28 (Sun)
• Jan 4 (Sun)

Skeleton crew

The initial skeleton crew of paid staff would be:

• 1 person in the store.
• 1 person in receiving.
• 1 person at FD for volunteer sign-in and receipt generation.

During part of the day the Receiving and FD people would spell each other for lunch and breaks. This means that whoever is left at receiving and FD would do a little double coverage.

Todo list

This items should be organized and in place in order to try this experiment:

Warehouse

Liane and Ian say these tasks will be easy to accomplish.

• a place for CRTs to wait until Tue
• a place for random stuff to wait until Tue
• a place on Printer Island for stuff to wait

Production

These tasks will require some extra testing hours up front. We've added Cliff to the advanced testing schedule a couple times per week in preparation.

• Extra stock for the store in highly sellable items:
  • wireless devices
  • mobos
  • PDAs
  • MP3 players
  • keyboards, mice
  • speakers
  • more?
  • AS MUCH TESTED AS POSSIBLE

Personnel

I've started a survey to see who would want extra hours, etc.

• Someone with an I key needs to be around for laptop lockup and hard drive storage in the TARDIS
• Find staff people to do these shifts.
• Cross train any staff people that need it.
• Find targeted, responsible volunteers to help.
• Have someone with a safe key for opening and closing
• Have a sysadmin on call in case
• Have backup subs on call in case a staffer is sick
• Schedule time off for Sunday staff so they don't burn out, and/or pay them extra for the extra hours.

Advertising

NOTE: Way back when we tried the store open on Mondays for a month. At the time the foot traffic coming into the store was largely driven by people coming to Free Geek for other reasons. Not doing outreach taught us it was not worthwhile to have the store open for an extra day (back then under those circumstances). The pattern of who comes to the store has changed since then, but we should still make an effort to bring people in.

We do not want to bring too many people in. We specifically don't want so many folks that they swamp us and we have nothing they'd want to purchase. That would be bad advertising.

These are routine and should be easy to accomplish:

• Web page change
• Send out email to core, council, e-newsletter lists
• Put something on phone message
• Print post cards or flyers for the store and front desk.

We decided to NOT re-orient our mailing to advertise the new hours.

Measuring success

• Compare store income for each calendar year (A) from 2003 - 2007 with related periods of Nov 15 - Jan 15 (B):
  • Note number of days open in each A and B
  1. Total amounts of A, B
  2. Ratio of B/A amounts
  3. Daily averages of A, B
  4. Daily minimum of A, B
  5. Daily maximum of A, B
  • Repeat all above reports, but by count of sales transactions, rather than amount sold
  • Similar reports for Front Desk (gizmo donation and contribution stats)
• Have a point person to summarize how things went to staff list each day

Other steps to plan for

Nothing hard here, just need to get someone to take each task.

• Pre-prepare tills.
• Ice cream and puppies
• Plan what to do when volunteers walk in and want to help (even if you don't want them to help)
• Line up backup tasks for volunteers in case the donation stream is light.
• Linux Clinic happens on Sunday, Dec 21. Work out logistics for that. Talk to them. Anyone else scheduled to use the space on these days?
  • MK is contacting them.
• If the store floor project starts before this, it should be DONE before November 23.
  • Scheduled for Nov 2-3. Darryl and Luiz are working on it.
• Soft barrier for discouraging access to back area.