It's here: Your favorite "e-zine" from Mad Maggie's. Fill up your coffee cup, strap on your seat belt, and dig in for the latest news from the best ice cream shop around!

Weather Blues

Well, this stretch of miserable weather we've been going through has all of us a little down -- the kids can't all get the hours they want, we're not selling enough ice cream to pay the bills, and it's just not a lot of fun sitting around the shop. As tough as it is when the weather is nice and we're working our butts off to keep up with the demand, we really look forward to the real arrival of some summer weather. It can't get here fast enough!

This past week or so has been especially trying, as those of you on our Newsletter mailing list know from the couple of urgent messages I sent out during our flood. We ended up getting about 6 inches of water in the store. Luckily, I was at the store early on Sunday morning when the waters were rising, and was able to call a couple of my kids down to the store to help get most of the equipment moved to higher ground.

Still, when I drove by the store on Sunday night, and saw how high the floodwaters were, I thought for sure that we would lose everything and be out of business for good. I have a bunch of photos to upload to the website. Surf on over to http://madmaggies.com/photos/ to see how bad the floods were.

(For the real-life blonde joke of the week, Maggie asked me if maybe we should rent a pump to pump out the water. Since the waters flowed all the way back into the woods behind us, for maybe a quarter mile, I told her we'd need a mile or so of hose to pump it all the way to Wilmington...)

Fortunately, the waters receded quickly, and we were able to get back up and running reasonably fast. We lost one freezer which we weren't able to get up high enough to protect from the waters, and we lost power to one other freezer. All in all, we lost around 30 tubs of ice cream, a freezer, and our small refrigerator, so we're scraping by on limited equipment at the moment. [ Late update: I picked up a replacement freezer on Tuesday, so we're back to our normal ice cream storage capacity...] More importantly, we lost nearly a week of business at a point in the year where we have a ton of bills backed up waiting to be paid. The forecast for the immediate future looks good, so hopefully we'll be able to do some good business this weekend and get back on our feet!

I told folks at my work, dumping 30 tubs of melted ice cream down the drain left me feeling as though I'd just buried a family pet.

A huge THANKS to everyone who offered words of encouragement during this dark period. I'm continually surprised at the quality of the people we've come to know through this business, and I received many offers of help, both spiritual and physical. I can't possibly thank everyone, so please just accept my general thanks to each of you for supporting us through this mess.

"Peoples Choice" Favorite Ice Cream Stand

This Sunday May 28th, from 10am to 1pm, Pat Whitley hosts "New England Dines" radio show on WRKO 680 AM. As happens every Memorial and Labor Day weekend, the theme of the show is "The Peoples Choice Favorite Ice Cream Stand", and callers are encouraged to phone in their vote for their favorite ice cream stand. (Webcast is available also at NEDINE.com.)

We have such a tiny little stand, we can't possibly compete with the heavyweights in the industty, but we're always flattered to hear our stand mentioned. If you are the type to call in to a show like this, we'd surely appreciate the recognition! Or just tune in and listen!

The call in phone number: 888-434-6464

Thanks!

Mad Maggie's Playlist

Working side by side with a bunch of teenagers, Maggie and I get exposed to a lot of different musical tastes, not all of them to our (or, "my", anyway) liking!

Still, it's fun to hear what the kids are listening to, and they occasionally surprise us.

This spring, I decided to try a little experiment. In one of my weekly newsletters to the kids (oh yeah -- they get exposed to their own special version of my words of wisdom weekly ;^), I gave them a project. I asked them to submit the name of one song that they thought the others on the team would enjoy listening to. No other restrictions.

Well, the songs are in, and we've got the "MadMaggies' Playlist" on the CD player at the shop, and it's a surprisingly fun mix to listen to. Some of the songs the kids chose were unknown to me, but after listening to them a few times I've come to enjoy them. We didn't have enough submissions to fill in an entire CD, so I added a few songs of my own.

For those interested, here's the list. See if you can figure out which of these are from the kids, and which are from me:

Maybe later in the summer, we'll take submissions from our customers and come up with a list of customer favorites.

Lights Out

Losing a week of business to the floods didn't seem like enough, I guess. So the Rain Gods, undoubtedly giggling among themselves as they did so, decided to probe the limits to which they can taunt me before I snap, by throwing a little micro-burst at us on Sunday night -- traditionally our busiest night of the week. A big gust blew through at around 6:15pm on Sunday, nearly ripping our ugly new awning off, and knocking down a tree a couple hundred yards south on route 28, which in turn took down the power lines and our electricity with it.

I had three of my best kids, Jenny, Janae, and John, working the shift, and we sat around in the dark for about 15 minutes before we realized that the power likely wasn't going to come on again anytime soon. So I gave them the choice of going home for the night, or sitting around while I ran home to get our little generator.

They unanimously wanted to stay, so I drove home to grab the generator, then dashed back and got it running. We were able to rig up one flourescent light, the "Open" sign, and the cash register, along with one dipping cabinet. So we did a small amount of business -- nothing like our normal Sunday night volume, but we had fun, and I'm sure the folks who ventured out into the dark night were happy to find us as the only business along the route 28 strip still open for business.

You can surf on over to our web site to see a couple of photos of our "dark night"!

Flavor News

I've been busily making sorbets this week, so we currently have a fresh Mango, fresh Strawberry, and fresh Watermelon sorbets in stock. (All of our sorbets are made from fresh fruit, so it's a little redundant to say "Fresh Strawberry Sorbet", but since most places call anything frozen without dairy "sorbet", even if they're made using artificial extracts, I feel I need to stick that qualifier on.) They're really a good taste too, so don't be afraid to ask for a sample.

We tried a Honey Cashew this week, though I don't think it's quite there yet, it's not bad. I did have one customer come to the window last night and order a waffle cone of it, along with a pint to take home. His remark was "it's nice to come to a place with some creativity in the flavors they offer!" Nice feedback for me!

We've also had a request to make a chocolate hazelnut, which is something I made a year or so ago, so hopefully by the time you get this, it's in stock.

Staff Profile

I've sort of run out of kids to pick on at this point, as I don't know the newer kids well enough to tease them (yet), so thought I'd fill this with our hiring news.

Every year, we seem to get a ton of applications around this time of year from kids hoping for an easy summer job of eating ice cream and serving an occasional ice cream. I suppose it's a nice testament to us that we've got a lot of applicants, while our nearest competition down the street has a "help wanted" sign as a fixture in their window.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of issues: One, this isn't an easy job. One of our crew who has filled in for us over the past year and was taking a more regular shift this spring came to me this past week and told me that, no hard feelings, but he was going to take another job, as he just didn't understand when I hired him how tough it can be to have to always be on his toes.

I completely understood, and wished him well, as serving the public, dealing with waves of demanding people clamoring for ice cream can really be daunting for a young kid -- I'm sort of surprised we don't lose more to this type of reaction.

The second issue is that the few kids who I have added to the team this year are ones who applied back in February. We give first consideration to those who are looking ahead enough to think about summer employment in February, so these kids get a huge advantage over those who are just now starting to think that maybe they might want to earn some money this summer.

Occasionally, one or two kids will walk up to talk to us at this time of year and really knock our socks off with their personality so that they get one of our jobs, but it doesn't happen often.

A third issue is that we're now firmly into our "family hiring" mode -- we've had several team members seemingly hand their job off to a younger sibling when they go off to college or on to greener pastures. Current team leader Jenny took over her sister Katie's position, and is already talking about turning her spot over to her younger brother. And last year's team leader Janelle has a younger sister Gina, who's next in line on our hiring list. I've found that good workers tend to have siblings who have the same work ethic, so this practice of hiring good families makes a lot of sense to me.

I'm always a little sad when a great kid applies and I don't have a spot to offer him/her, but that's part of the life of running a small business, so I guess I shouldn't feel so bad. But I do -- I really with we could hire them all! (So buy more ice cream, so that our buisiness grows and we can hire all of your kids! ;^)

Newsletter Coupon

Memorial Day weekend, with good hot weather calls for a special coupon, so here's probably our BEST coupon of the year: Come by the store, bring a friend with you, and buy one small sundae, get the second one for FREE!

Pay for yours, and your friend's is free. Or, depending upon how good a friend, have them pay, and YOURS is free! Maybe we need to keep a running tally to see if our dedicated newsletter readers are more predominately "givers" or "takers".

You don't even have to print out this letter, just tell whoever is at the window that you're a newsletter reader, and "Steve said to give me this special offer". I'll even try to let them all know, so hopefully there won't be any fistfights over this or anything like that. Just please don't moon the kids if they don't know what you're asking for -- they hate when people do that...

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OK, that's enough for this week. I've got a ton of ice cream making to catch up on, so I'm off to the shop. Have a GREAT Memorial Day weekend, as the forecast is for super weather, especially on Monday. (We'll be opening at 3pm on Monday for the holiday.)

Sure hope to see you there soon!