St. Augustine Seafood Festival, March 3-5, 2017. Wind, cold, and more wind!!!

Last year (2016) was All Fresh Kitchen's appearance at the St. Augustine Seafood Festival. The weather had been perfect and the sales were terrific. This year was entirely different. The problem for vendors is that if a particular event is the first time in which they have participated, they have no sales history. Therefore, vendors are unsure of how much to order and bring to the festival or how much food to prepare etc. If the event was a super success, then vendors base their next year's product amount on the past year's sales. It can be a catch 22 situation, such as our experience this year. We based our ordering (15 bushels of corn) on last year's sales. However, this years sales was 50% less than last year's. Of course, vendors usually blame weather on bad sales and this year we really had a right to complain about the weather. It was cold and terribly windy. My brother and business partner Jim and I got together with a few other vendors, all of whom said the same thing--"sales are down by 50%." After consulting with one another what we as a group came to the conclusion of concerning the downturn in sales is that WE HAVE NO CLUE WHY! And so goes the life of food vendors--the good, the bad, and the ugly.