Going wholesale

Going wholesale is very different from just being a coffee retailer. The marketing is different, the customers are different and the hours are different. At our retail shop in Berkeley, we were open 7 days a week from 7am to 6pm Mon-Sat. and from 8am to 12pm on Sundays. We needed to have an employee there on time to open and someone had to be there at all times during the work hours. Like I said both my husband and I were working full time jobs and so we had to depend on other people to be there and hope that they were doing a good job. We thought once we moved to wholesale all our problems would be solved. We didn't need anyone there all the time because there would be no walk in traffic. We basically took our little index box of our wholesale customers and we thought that would be good enough. Well it was for awhile except that you really can't grow a business if no one is there. I bought an answering machine...yes that was in the late 80s when there was no such thing as voicemail. I made a recording asking the customer to leave their name and number and their coffee order. Then I would check the machine periodically for the orders. When we got an order, my husband and I would go down to San Leandro after our day job and go roast coffee and fill orders. This went on for a couple of years until we were down to only a handful of customers. I guess we really missed the mark when it came to customer service. People don't like just leaving their orders on a machine without any human contact. The majority of our wholesale customers were cafes, restaurants and a few mom and pop stores. If the customer had been with us for awhile and liked our coffee, they didn't mind just leaving the orders on the machine. But once the purchaser left and a new person came on board, they didn't think much about our customer service. I guess I can't say I blame them as I also like good customer service, but what were we to do at that time when we were both working in the day. Luckily the rent was very reasonable at the warehouse and we had enough customers that we were able to make a small profit. Of course, if we had paid ourselves a decent salary for the time that we put in, we probably would have been losing money. However, when you're first starting a business you don't take into account all the time you put in. Despite all the pros of going strictly wholesale, I found myself missing the retail aspect. I missed seeing and talking to customers and having a store front. By the early 1990s, I was itching to jump back in to the retail side.