Please read through the following items to help you understand some important items in working at the Cannery. Even if the question does not apply to you, we hope this will help you better understand what we are trying to do at the Cannery. We apologize for the length of this email beforehand, but hope you will take the time to assimilate this information.
We haven’t finished all the email registrations (you will hear from us very soon), but so far, scheduling through the email seems like a very viable option. We still need to go through all the comments to make the final determination, but we are encouraged by the number of responses we received to this mode of registration. Phone calls are so difficult because it ties up the line for so long and people get frustrated with getting a busy signal over and over.
We purposefully gave as few instructions in filling out the email registration as possible so I could determine, from how you responded, what would work the best. There will be more instructions the next time (if we do this again) as to what we need you do to get scheduled. Different email servers offer different capabilities that we were not aware of. However, we got some great ideas as to what will work the best.
Some questions being asked about the email registration:
1) What are the prices & case sizes for the current schedule?:
a. Every item that we are producing this time has 24, 14.5 oz cans per case. These are larger cans than the normal soup cans you buy in the store, so when you are making price comparisons, be sure to do it per ounce. We are just under the normal price of the Campbell’s soups per ounce—and every bit as good—if not better (unbiased opinion, of course).
b. Cream of Chicken: $31.20/case
c. Diced Tomatoes: $18.00/case
d. Cream of Mushroom Soup: $27.60/case
e. Pork & Beans: $19.20/case
2) What if I was assigned the full case limit, but didn’t want that many? (Forgive the following epistle)
Each person is allowed the same number of cases when they work a shift. What you do with your allotted number of cases is up to you. You always have the option of taking less than you have ordered, but since you are already coming, we hope you would take the opportunity to take your full allotment and then offer any extra cases to someone who may not be able to work for themselves. By doing this, the purpose of Family Canning is maximized by blessing more lives--and at the same time, it helps us establish the demand for Family Canning at our facility. Check with friends and family-- they may not be aware of the opportunities offered by the Cannery and might be more than happy to accept your offer. Swap child care with someone who will watch your children while you come and work. This would open up more times of the day you can be available. By maximizing the number of cases for each person, we are able to schedule more people and work at the Cannery’s full potential.
*If you are able to find someone to purchase your extra cases, please have them write their checks to you and use your own check to pay the Cannery when you come to work. This is helpful to us when we have to match a check to a receipt. We wouldn’t have the information for someone who didn’t actually come and work.
3) How long are the shifts?
Although we bring new shifts on each hour, each shift for this schedule is for 2.5 hours. Patrons are rotated according to the times they arrived. Please do not sign up for a shift that you cannot stay the full 2.5 hours. Even though we sometimes let patrons go early, that is up to the discretion of the floor supervisors and the production needs.
4) Why did I get assigned a day or time that wasn’t on my request?
Our first priority was to fill up the first two days of shifts on each of the products. (Those were the days and times we offered on the email.) Once we had adequate help on those times, we began looking at the last day on the schedule and other shifts that weren’t “over-filled”. If you were assigned a different time than you requested, it was already full when we got to your request. When we assign a different day or time, we do our best to give you the closest time available to what you had indicated. As instructed in the reply email, please call to cancel or move to another available time for any assignment that you cannot fill. (If you received an email confirmation AND a mailed confirmation, please either get someone to take the 2nd shift or call to cancel the unwanted shift.
5) Why do I need to come and work on each product? Why not just wait for the Overage sale?
This was probably our biggest concern when we offered the overage to those who hadn’t come and worked. We hoped that we weren’t fostering an attitude of “I’ll just wait for the overage since I don’t HAVE to come and work”. In order to even offer the product, we have to have willing hands to help produce it. We are not a store that has a continuous supply. We only have what has been produced by those who come and work.
After the production is complete, we need to clear out the product as soon as possible since we have such limited storage space and we are moving directly into the next assignment/schedule—with all of its gazillion pallets of cans and ingredients. After we had given adequate opportunity to our diligent family canners, we still had surplus. We had to clear the floor as quickly as possible. This won’t always happen. We usually sell out to our family canners long before all of them even get what they want.
6) How will we schedule multiple people on the same shift?
We even had this situation come up—scheduling more than one person on the same shift. We were able to figure out what people sent in, but we are still working on what would work the best in this situation. We’ll let you know more if we do this again.
Please understand that by receiving a return email from us to the email registration, there were assignments made for you to come. WE NEED FOR YOU TO COME!
We have copies of all of the emails we returned and can look up this information, but we want you to call if you didn’t understand what you got back from us. If you cannot come to an assigned shift, you need to call and cancel it. We are constantly evaluating and re-evaluating how much product we will have available for many reasons. We were concerned that this way of scheduling would raise the number of people who cancel or don’t show up for their shifts because of the ease of scheduling. If we see a rise in the number of “no shows”, we may have to return to the snail mail method of registration since that requires a bigger commitment from you to get scheduled.
There is rarely an expressed complaint that hasn’t already been considered. But in knowing the whole picture, we make the best possible decision for all aspects of the situation. Please continue to trust us in doing our very best to make the Family Canning process more efficient.
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