* Matt_Pritt won $30 Amazon gift card (5 minutes ago)
* Amanda_Elliott won Nintendo Wii (1 days ago)
* KoKo_Bunz won $30 Amazon gift card (1 days ago)
* NativeDiva won $30 Amazon gift card (3 days ago)
* The_Great_One won Nintendo Wii (3 days ago)
That would seem to be a nice way to start. Actually that is a copy and paste from the Scratchix page over on Facebook, where I have been tinkering with the app for around a year or so and today I finally collected the 25th and final token to win the $30 Amazon gift card prize. As I have doted on before, I am a pretty big fan of Amazon, so getting an extra $30 to spend on their site is perfectly fine with me. Especially with the holidays coming up, I can do some of my shopping online rather than venture out to the malls and stuff. I think I have about $60 in my account there right now, plus I have two $5 gift cards pending from Swagbucks, so I am looking forward to cruising around their site and seeing what I can buy.
I told you all that this would be the "Fall of My Content" after the "Summer of Suck" that has now passed and getting free stuff is just making it better. Life has been relatively good these days, I can't complain. Well I can and sometimes do complain, but in the grand scheme of things I am complaining about minor nuisances rather than full blown suck. Which is a major upgrade over the way things had been previously.
Work has been going okay. I think I might have finally gotten a crew that works as hard, if not harder, than me. Ed has been telling me to cut back on what I do, let the more strenuous tasks be handled by those beneath me, but I am not one to do that. I will not ask my crew to do anything I wouldn't do, but just the idea of having more than my lone pair of hands doing things makes everything better. And unlike previous hires, the two newest hires, Sammy and Brian, both seem to be working out quite well. I think I first mentioned them in the blog on Oct 3rd and we still have them, which in and of itself is a pleasant surprise. It hasn't all been wine and roses, we had some issues with Brian, but there weren't really his fault, more the fault of the situation he is in.
Brian made some bad decisions previously, I can't go into details on them because I really don't know what they were and even if I did, they aren't anyone's business besides his and whomever he decides to tell. I will only say that he was incarcerated for a time and now is staying in a halfway house, a place where he can serve out the remainder of his time, yet be a functional member of society if he chooses. His responsibilities are to keep his nose clean and check in every night. Any screwups on his part and they will send him back to jail. While I don't monitor him 24 hours a day, he seems to be doing his best to stay out of trouble, finish off his time in the halfway house and use his currently employed status to squirrel away a couple of bucks to find something when he gets out. To which I say good for him. My only concern is that when you are at work you do your job, and he does a very good job (as does Sammy), so no complaints from me.
This is the part of the story where I tell you about a new product we have been selling called K2. Basically K2 is a legal, synthetic marijuana type drug. I haven't tried it to note how effective or ineffective it is, even if I had my few experiences with marijuana (which consisted mostly of just getting a headache) would leave me as a pretty bad person to compare one with the other. That being said, for the time being K2 (and an assortment of similar products we also started selling recently) are all well within the confines of the law. And they have been doing quite well for us. Retailing anywhere from $19.99-$39.99 for a packet, we are selling probably 100 or so every couple of days. It has been a cash cow for us, no doubt. The problem for us came with the fact that while it is legal, it is close enough to an illegal substance that it set off alarm bells with the people that Brian has to check in with. Mind you, he is with me, he isn't actually behind the counter selling it, nor has he been buying at work and using it, but just the proximity of it and him was enough for the people at his current place of residence to cry foul and say he couldn't work for us. Thankfully we were able to work out a deal with his check in people where he could still work at our other store downtown (where we do not sell K2) and as an added bonus it saves me from running down the street a few times a week stocking coolers in two different stores, for the time being anyway, that store becomes his responsibility and all I have to do there is the ordering.
We are getting ready for Ed to make his annual trip back down to Florida. I think I am probably more anxious than most, not that I am mad at Ed or anything, but we are both pretty strong willed people and at times our egos can clash. Plus he got my hockey tickets. At least that is my story, and I am sticking to it.
I have mentioned previously that Ed and I sometimes play good cop, bad cop with the sales reps that come in. I smooth things over, Ed brings the killer instinct of getting as much as he can for as little as he can. I would like to think the method has some merits, by me being nice the reps know they have someone who is looking out for them to a degree, that if we can all make money then we can all be happy, while Ed pushes hard for any extras or deals that may fall his way. For example, Coke recently started doing a promotion where they were giving lift tickets to Seven Springs, a local ski resort, to locations that started ordering Dasani water, a Coke product. Well, we have had Dasani water since long before I was put in charge of the ordering. Coke's obvious goal was to push another product on vendors to increase sales, and since they have the beverage contract at Seven Springs, getting lift tickets as a bonus for them was no real big feat. But to Ed it was an insult, because here he was, selling the product all along and he was offered nothing. His argument, and it is one I understand, was that the people who should be getting rewarded are the long term clients who have been selling the product rather than the new people just signing on, looking to get a freebie for their troubles. So when the sales rep for Coke came in, Ed wanted to see him and basically said if he wasn't offered lift tickets then he was taking Dasani out of his cooler. Of course the rep caved in, not one to lose a sale and like I said, the lift tickets for them are pretty much an easy get, but it is just the type of thing a rep has to deal with when dealing with Ed. Next thing you know, Ed is trying to see what else he can get, so he is bargaining with the rep about adding an extra cooler at a cost of tickets to the Winter Classic hockey game at Heinz Field between the Penguins and the Capitals, since Coke also has the beverage contract over there as well. Not that d likes sporting events, in fact despite the family having season tickets to the Steelers, Penguins and Pirates, he almost never goes. Partially due to a lack of interest, partially due to suffering from tinnitus from his time serving in Vietnam, Ed just doesn't go to sporting events. But he will use the tickets as leverage in future negotiations with other people, or as perks for those that have worked hard for him. I have gotten the baseball tickets a couple of times and the hockey tickets once, so I have been a beneficiary of said policy. The Winter Classic thing is still up in the air, the rep said he would look into it, Ed offered him a spot in the store right next to the registers, which sales people love (impulse buys at the point of sale and all that jazz).
That being said, when it comes to the good cop, bad cop routine, I have been the good cop. And it has worked as well. Fred is our 7 Up rep, and I like him, I don't know if Ed does or not, like I said Ed can be pretty hard on everyone when it comes to sales people, so it is hard to get a bead on his actual liking of any of them. Unless they are female, but that is another story. Anyway, I have been left to handling much of the smoothing over process with Fred. Earlier this year Ed wanted to increase his space for dairy products, which meant we either had to find room for another cooler (not likely, and even if space were available you get into circuit problems because of the way the building is wired) or we had to take something out for the dairy cooler to go in. Ed took one of the two 7 Up coolers, which didn't make 7 Up happy and left me with the job of smoothing things over and coming up with a workable plan where we could get the essentials things from 7 Up (the ones that sell) and weed out some of the lesser moving products. So Fed and I sat down, banged out a pretty good plan and he is still able to sell us roughly 40 cases of product a week, despite having one cooler in which to sell it. Not too shabby of a job on my part, if I do say so myself.
So Fred came in the store about two months ago, and after we walked through the next week's order we stopped by the office because Fred wanted to pass along the info of the upcoming sale (Sunkist was going off sale, 7 Up was going on sale) and a promotion they were offering with the Pittsburgh Penguins. 7 Up, despite being the #3 player in the market, managed to snag the beverage contract at the Penguins new home, the Consol Energy Center. So they were running a couple of contests, one for customers where you collect soda caps and if you find the words to certain phrases, such as "power play" or "a great day for hockey", you could then send them in and win hockey tickets. The conversation was pretty boring to Ed, not being a hockey fan and the fact it was a customer promotion and not for retailers, he tuned out rather quickly. Instead he told me to handle it. Fine, no problem. As we are walking out Fred tells me of another promotion for retailers, where 7 Up is raffling off Penguins stuff, tickets, jerseys, and the like and to be involved in it all we had to do was buy product, which we were already doing. We were to get 7 entries to start and an additional entry for every 10 cases of 20 oz. bottles we bought. To me it was a no brainer, we didn't really didn't have to change anything we were doing, no new product was being added, nor were we being forced to buy any more than we already were, just keep doing what we are doing and there would be a chance that we might get something from it. So I said, sure, throw us in and see what happens.
Well what happened is we won. Two tickets to see the Penguins from a luxury box at the Consol Energy Center, retail value of $200 per ticket. The view from the seats would look something like this.
Needless to say, I was geeked. But since I don't actually buy anything, I spend other people's money as it were, of course I had to give the tickets to Ed, but I hoped that he would end up giving them to me, since I did sign us up for the promotion, and of course, I am a big hockey fan. But it wasn't to be. Ed used the tickets as a perk for someone else, his doctor I believe. Given his doctor just recently put a new stent in his heart, I guess it is okay, but I was still disappointed. Ed told me that he would get me into a game at some point this year, just not this one. And I am pretty sure he will, I have no reason to disbelieve him based on everything he has done for me in the past.
Remember, this is the "Fall of My Content", therefore whenever a door closes, the rest of the world opens as it were. One of the bad things about Facebook is that I can get easily distracted, I think of something I like and I look it up to see if there is a fan page or something, or I get buried in playing with apps. Well on one such occasion I was tinkering around and I decided to look up Isaly's. Isaly's was a deli/restaurant chain locally for a while, but most of the restaurants have since closed up, I think there are maybe two or three still in operation, but one of the things they became known for was chipped ham, a thinly sliced ham that is very scrumptious on sandwiches. So while the restaurant end of the operation didn't fare very well, the deli side did and in pretty much any grocery store in the area you can get chipped ham as one of the many lunch meats available. Well, I had been craving a chipped ham sandwich as it were, and I was on Facebook and while I couldn't very well order one on the web, at least I don't think I can, I thought I would give a look see for an Isaly's page or a fan page. Sure enough, there was an Isaly's page, and one of the most recent posts on the page was a contest they were doing. The contest was simple, yet hard, simple in it's design but hard in actually completing it. The premise was to answer three trivia questions regarding the Pittsburgh Penguins (and local hockey), then email them with the answers. Three emails with the correct answers would be chosen, the 1st, 3rd and 13th received would win a pair of Penguin tickets and a $25 supermarket gift card. The first question was what team did Mike Rupp play for in junior hockey? Off to the internet I went, looking for the answer, but I came up with two teams that he played for, not one as the question would suggest. So I was left with a question of picking one or the other, or writing both down and assuming the question was phrased wrong. I went with both and figured that my entry was now all but blown. Next was to name the local hockey prospect that was expected to go in the first round of the 2011 NHL draft. More searching, lots of hockey prospect sites with many of them not having much information about the player's backgrounds. Finally I came across Brandon Saad, who grew up in the area, but was currently playing junior hockey in Saginaw. That was as close as I could come to anyone locally, so I ran with it. Last was a question about Sidney Crosby and the Penguins and was what other significant event happened the same night as Crosby's first NHL game after being named captain of the Penguins? This was pretty easy by comparison, it was also Michel Thierren first game as Penguin's coach. So I figured worst case scenario I got 1 of 3 right, and the time I spent researching the answers probably meant I didn't have a snowball's chance in hell, I spent nearly an hour looking this stuff up.
That was back on Sept 30th. I didn't hear anything from them, nor was anything posted on their Facebook page, so I just pretty much forgot about it. I assumed that I had at least one of the questions wrong, or in this hockey mad environment, even if I did have the right answers, there were people faster than me in sending in the answers.
So Wednesday I am coming in from work and I do what I almost always do, hop on the computer and fireup the iGoogle homepage where I have it set to show me the most recent emails I have received and I see one from an address that I didn't recognize. I open it to find out that I was one of the three winners, two hockey tickets for a future game and a $25 supermarket gift card. Not much on the specifics, the email asked for my mailing address for where the prizes could be sent. I replied with a quick thank you and my address, but still wasn't positive I had actually won. After all, it could have been someone pulling a prank on me, so I did some snooping on Facebook to confirm. So I made a trip to the Isaly's page and saw this...
Isaly's Original Chipped Chopped Ham and BBQ Sauce Congratulations to our "Hockey: The Real Deal" contest winners! Matt Pritt, Ray Butter and Beth Novoselski each win a pair of tickets to an upcoming Penguins game and a $25 supermarket gift card. Check back here for more contests in the future!
It was official, so woohoo me and all that jazz. It would be a few more days, Saturday to be precise when the prize arrived in the mail. I have two tickets for the Pittsburgh-Phoenix game on Dec 20th as well as a $25 gift card for Kuhn's market. Of course the thing is, Kuhn's is a market that is less than prevalent in the area. Unlike the bigger chains like Giant Eagle, Shop N Save or Foodland, Kuhn's has maybe 7 or 8 stores total, none particularly close to me, but I was more interested in the hockey tickets anyway. If I get a chance to use the gift card, great, if not, no big thing.
I suppose I have yammered enough for now. I don't feel like getting all politicky or boring people with whatever it is my respective fantasy teams are doing this time, so I am just going to call it a blog and go watch the Steeler game.
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