Athens Locally Grown rules for growers

I've been asked to share the rules for growers at my market. Here's the entirety of the information I've added to the "Grower" section of the Your Account page.

Product Deadline: Please have all your products added to the website and their quantities adjusted by 6pm on Sunday. I will turn the site on for the customers that evening, and this will give me a few hours to contact you if I have any questions. You can start listing products on Wednesday, so that gives you nearly five days to get your products on the site.

Product Names: The form where you add products instructs you, "If this market has established a naming convention (such as "Tomato - Cherokee Purple"), be sure to follow it. Look at the other products in this category to see if there is a pattern you should be following." Despite this, many of you continually give your products bad names. Calling something "medium green" tells us nothing about what the product is, bad spelling, all lower case letters, and incorrect punctuation just look bad, and naming things any old way makes the listings unorganized and harder for the customers to find what they're looking for. Following our established naming practice requires a small bit of effort from you, but it has much larger effects on our customers and market volunteers later in the week. The core name of the item goes first, followed by a couple dashes, followed by the specific variety and other adjectives. If you are selling two sizes of the same thing, include the size in your product name. For example: "Arugula - Baby Roquette - Large Bag"

Products that do not follow our naming conventions may be removed from the market without notice!

Pricing: You set all of your own prices, but the market keeps 10% of your sales as a "table fee". Keep that in mind while setting your prices. Also, if your prices are set below fair market prices, we'll adjust them up accordingly for the fairness of the other growers. We'll try to contact you first. If you're looking for a place to cheaply dump an excess of produce, we'll help you find another place for that. Finally, please keep in mind that we are moving through hundreds of customers in a short period of time, so please keep your prices easy for everyone. That is, don't set something to $1.99 when $2.00 will do. The customers don't want to be digging for pennies and the cashiers can't be calculating that kind of change in a timely manner. We don't have cash registers, and have to do everything by hand.

Delivery: Unless we've made other arrangements with you, please deliver your orders between 3:30 and 4pm on Thursday at our customer pickup location. Your money will be waiting for you in the form of a check out of the shared cash box the week after the sale, so sales this week get paid for next week. This give us time to collect from the customers and get the money into the bank.

Labels and Packaging: It makes things so much easier for our market workers and our customers if you have your orders bagged (or packaged as appropriate) and labelled using the labels generated by this website (on your "View Open Orders" page, below).

Should your sales exceed the amount you actually have available, please fill the orders in the order they are shown. If there are orders you cannot fill, you can remove those orders from your sales on the website (on the "View Your Open Orders" page - the same page where you print labels) or let Eric know either via email or phone (706 248 1860) before 2pm Thursday so he can adjust the paperwork before printing it all.

Meet the Grower: Each week, we have space available for customers to "Meet the Grower". Here’s how it works: You get 10 feet of table space to set up however you like. You can bring information about your farm, samples, photos, anything you like. Even a full farmers market-style set-up is just fine — it’s your space to use as you’d like. If you sell anything and bring your own cash box to make change, then you can keep everything you bring in — no table fee. If you want customers to just pay at the market’s cash box, then we’ll collect the 10% table fee just as if you’d listed through the website. Your choice. You need to be set up and ready to go by 4:30. Customers pick up orders right up until 8pm, but if you need to leave before then, that’s fine. If you'd like to reserve a week, look up above at the grower calendar and find and empty slot and let us know. We do ask that you sign up for one week of volunteer duty filling orders for each week you wish to have the "meet the grower" table.

The "Extras" Table We often have a limited amount of space for you to bring a few extras to sell. Here are the rules:

• Everything must be appropriately packaged and labelled with your farm name, the product inside, and the price.
• The market keeps 20% of what sells as a table fee, and the 80% will get added to your next payment. Unless you come at 8pm to pick up what doesn't sell, anything left over will be given away, and you will not get credit for them.
• You should only bring things that you sold out of on the website but still have available (that is, you underestimated your quantity) or items you didn't list because you didn't expect to have them. If they didn't sell on the website, don't bring them for the extras table. This is not the right place to dump your excess that didn't sell.