Tales from either side of the till

Marketing seminars have taught me that I need to build a brand to promote our farm, but I’ve found that my old-fashioned butcher’s scale is a better tool for connecting with our customers.

Every summer, my husband, John; my sister-in-law Sally; and I erect two pop-up shelters with nylon canvas the same color as our blueberries. We haul in two tables, an old wooden kitchen table as the check-in station and a longer trestle table. 

Sally prefers weighing buckets of blueberries on an electronic scale that sits at one end of the trestle table. Her scale has an instant readout, and I hear her occasionally exclaim over this feature all afternoon as she weighs customers’ berries that they’ve picked. 

My scale sits at the other end of the table. Although I rely upon my Instant Pot to cook meals quickly, I prefer my heavy white scale with its stainless-steel tray on top. When I set a bucket of blueberries on it, the scale bounces a bit before it stabilizes, and a line stops by the weight. During the wait, conversations begin.

“I haven’t seen a scale like that for decades,” a grandparent exclaims. Then he talks about the butcher shop in his hometown grocery store or visiting a farm stand and watching a similar scale weigh butternut squash. I share my childhood experiences with old-fashioned scales, and we mention the hanging type sometimes found in produce departments. Word by word, a relationship forms between the customer, myself, and our farm.

Children are captivated by my scale. No screens, no buttons to click. On the customer side of the scale is a simple window where kids can follow the bouncing line until it comes to rest at the correct weight. Most children are eager to know if they picked more berries than their siblings or parents did, so I weigh each bucket individually to honor their interest. If there is time, I show them how they can read upward along a grid on a poster to find out how much 2 pounds of blueberries used to cost, long ago. 

Families with more buckets take longer to weigh in, and conversations may wander to how their gardens are growing. They might also ask me to identify a particular bird or spider. Usually, no one is in a rush. Coming to pick fruit is a form of entertainment. Families want to forget about text messages and TikTok, at least for a while. 

Visitors to the farm seem happy to be, as one customer’s T-shirt put it, “Unplugged.” For an hour or so, they unwind between the rows of highbush blueberries, and listen to the cicadas and the crows. And then they weigh in, watching my butcher’s scale bounce with their buckets of berries and adding the weight of their appreciation for the farm I love. 

– Joan Donaldson

A charitable conspiracy unfolds in a checkout line

We’ve all been there: in a checkout line with a cart or basket of a few groceries, cash or credit card poised, perhaps with only one or two customers ahead of us. And so it was today for me at a store a mile or so from my home near Basel, Switzerland. 

I had three items. A woman and two teenage boys ahead of me had maybe a half-dozen. The customer at the register, a delicate, white-haired woman, had already begun to bag her goods and was holding out cash to pay for them.

Then came the snag. Sometimes it’s a customer with multiple coupons, or someone who forgot to weigh a piece of fruit (this is the customer’s responsibility in European groceries), or someone searching for exact change. Fair enough. One waits.

But today, it was something else. For whatever reason, this woman didn’t have enough money. And so she began the process of choosing which items to keep and which to hand back to the cashier for re-shelving. She paused over each one before keeping or relinquishing it.

We waited. Longer lines surged ahead. I thought maybe I’d shop some more, or join a different line. Instead, I stayed.

The process went on and on. Outside, my bus came and went. Finally in the black, the woman turned back to us as she left, embarrassed and apologetic. We waved off her chagrin. It could happen to anyone. We were honestly sympathetic.

But I had no idea just how sympathetic the trio ahead of me were until their turn came. The woman with the teens asked the cashier to add all the left-behind items to her tab as quickly as possible. The cashier swung into action. Then the two boys sprinted through the exit with the small bag of groceries.

When they returned it was clear their mission had been accomplished. 

“Das war sehr Hubsch!” (That was very nice!), I offered. Now they seemed embarrassed, too.

All it took to witness this flash of collaborative kindness was waiting a little longer in a checkout line. I could have caught the next bus. But I felt so light on my feet that I walked home instead.

– Sue Wunder