July 30th, 2007
Its Monday. Its very early in the morning. I am heading home. I am, in the words of vernacular English, “knackered”. It has been a very long, very tiring, but very successful show. Cecelia and Colleen have one more day to wrap it up and close up the booth. My right knee is swollen from too much standing, my voice has gone from too much talking but the view from my hotel window is worth pausing for. Heavy clouds rolling in from the lake across the distinctive Chicago skyline. Me? I am outta here! Limp and all, I am heading home!
More artistic views of Chicago...it really is a great city |
Posted in BAZZA, Cooper Tea Business Trips | 3 Comments »
July 29th, 2007
At the show they had a mock up supermarket aisle with all the products that the distributor handles (and there were many!). Here is BAZZA on display. It is in the HEB supermarket chain in Texas and is doing well. We are going to start sampling the product in the stores as that is the best way to attract customers. Once you taste BAZZA you are hooked. As the blog reviewer said “it is curiously addictive”. We loved those words.
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July 28th, 2007
Now we are in the heart of the show. Three days down, two to go and we are now meeting/greeting and showing and tasting product! There is a lot of very positive follow up and the BIG news is that in ten days YOU WILL BE ABLE TO LOG ONTO www.bazzatea.com AND BUY PRODUCT ON LINE AT THE SAME PRICE YOU CAN BUY IT IN A STORE (plus freight of course) This is really exciting as we have been trying to find a way to reach more people with BAZZA and now we can. Apparently web shopping is now a HUGE business and BAZZA just joined the melee…OK folks. its now up to you to log on and get BAZZA rolling nationwide.
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July 27th, 2007
The Trade show was held at the McCormick center of which the Lakeside center is part. The architecture is worth paying attention to. They do it right in the windy city!
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July 27th, 2007
This was one of the most extraordinary events I have ever attended. The event started at noon. It took place in a huge ballroom that was filled with trestle tables, folding chairs and 500 people. It is what I would call a sales familiarization process. I sat at a table with my staff, Colleen and Cecelia. In front of us was a sign that said #65 Cooper Tea Company. A bell sounded at noon and a distributor sales representative found us, sat down opposite us and said “Tell me about your product”. We had ten minutes to do the entire sales pitch on BAZZA, why it was so good, what made it unique, what the price structure is, etc, etc. At the end of ten minutes another bell sounded and the sales rep leapt to his feet and moved on and another sales rep, representing a different part of the country, sat down and we had to go through the whole thing again. We had 15 sales reps. That’s 150 minutes of non-stop talking..(2 1/2 hours!!) of saying the same thing over and over again. I was exhausted and I still had 4 days to go! Cecelia said the good thing was that by the end of this event she could give my sales pitch word for word….
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July 26th, 2007
On the road again! Now in Chicago for a distributor trade show. The distributor manages our BAZZA tea into supermarkets around the country.
Chicago is hot, humid and I am going to be here for five days. It is a looooooong show!
Posted in BAZZA, Cooper Tea Business Trips, On the Road | 3 Comments »
July 25th, 2007
One of the great measurements of time and the passing of years are your children’s birthdays. It does not seem that long ago that Rory, my youngest son (on the right), wanted nothing more than a set of “power wheels”. Now he wants nothing more than a large Margarita and the company of a couple of friends to celebrate his birthday. Plus of course his parents to settle accounts? Nah, we were there ’cause he loves our company. He is in his last year of College on the east coast. It is a very liberal College and he has returned a very liberal person. He drives his elder brother and his sister NUTS..(they are both of a conservative bent). But, if you cant be liberal when you are young, when can you be? When you get old you get tolerant. Tolerance and liberalism are not the same things…I had this discussion with Rory…he accused me of being a liberal conservative. I replied I was a conservative liberal with a high degree of tolerance towards young liberals. The debate continues.
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July 24th, 2007
I have always been fascinated by the assassination of JFK (Along with millions of others). I was in London at the time and it is one of those events that you can remember EXACTLY where you were when you heard the news.As I learned more about the event I became convinced that one lone lunatic with the history that Lee Harvey Oswald had could not have done this. There was just too much smoke around for me to believe that he was not either part of a conspiracy or a Patsy. I always thought he was the latter, as you could not pick a person with a more bedraggled past. I mean how many of us have served in the Marines in an area of intelligence, been fired from the Marines, left the US, gone to RUSSIA, tried to surrender their US passport, married a Russian women, then return to the US to become an agitator for CUBA, all by the time they were 24 years old?????????????????????????????????and this in the 1960’s at the height of the COLD WAR!!!! I mean the mind boggles. Then you get the Mob news, the Bay of Pigs failure, LBJ’s home town, Bobby Kennedy’s attack on the mob, etc and there was just so much smoke I believed there was a huge fire somewhere.I have read books on the subject, watched videos, seen the movie JFK a number of times and visited Daley Plaza a number of times (that’s where JFK was shot). So, I was fascinated when Vincent Bugliosi came out with a massive tome of 1600 pages of very small print claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin. I have a lot of respect for Mr. Bugliosi, his book Helter Skelter is fascinating and he is a first class writer and a first class lawyer. Charlie Manson would still be running around killing people if it wasn’t for Mr. Bugliosi. So, I bought the huge book to read. I am on page 136 and it has taken me two weeks to get that far. To make life even more interesting I am off to Dallas today for business but I am going to take the time to re-visit Daley Plaza to see the assassination site again and take pictures for my blog. I love this kind of thing. History in real time.
Posted in On the Road | 6 Comments »
July 24th, 2007
We arrive in Dallas where the Dallas Cowboys play. The stadium is in Irving, Texas, where Maria Oswald was staying when Lee supposedly shot the President.
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July 24th, 2007
We are now driving down ELM street. The Texas Book Depository Building is going to be on the right hand side after we make a left hand turn down Houston Street. This is the same view Kennedy had,
as this is the same route and the buildings have not changed.
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