I went to the Fig Bay's Facebook page and put some real colorful emojis on there.
So I left her a little nut on there for her.
Of course she does.
But now I have a small grocery store over at the next door between the next door over here.
We've been in business for a long time.
The store was built in 1973 as a small convenience store.
I worked there as a kid.
My dad managed the business.
We lived across the street from the store.
To this day, I still hold a record from being fired the most.
Nobody's ever had it.
My dad would fire me to send me home and we'd get busy and he'd call me back.
What I'm going to do is several steps here.
I'm going to give you just an overview of the food industry and kind of a 35,000 foot view.
I'm going to take that down a little bit to some macro trends that are affecting our industry
and will probably be here for a while.
Some things a little bit more micro stuff that we're facing right now
but things that I believe certainly will be changed.
Then I'm going to get down with the ways to sell your product,
whether it's in a chain store, whether it's in some of the other channels that we have out there.
I'm going to close a little bit and I really appreciate some of the things that Chuck said.
I'm going to go back and have a little bit of that.
In the retail food industry today, there's tremendous amount of players.
What the home industry has realized is that you eat more than you do anything else.
People that we never thought would be selling food are now in the food business.
Most of the channels that we call them are kind of fleshing out to be about two major operators.
That doesn't mean that there can't be more out there and in several categories there are still more.
What you're starting to see in a lot of places is getting down to two companies.
If you look at the mass merchandiser category, if you look at that channel,
you find Walmart and Target are very dominant.
The days of teamwork continue to wane away.
Walmart certainly has had their struggles.
When you have a fleet of stores that dig, that diverge, that need employees, that have some challenges,
they close a bunch of stores this year, I think about 163 stores that they closed.
Target, I guess, has been a tremendous amount in the news in the last few days for some of the changes there in America.
But those are the two dominant companies, they're very good operators.
If you look at the wholesale club segment, you see Costco, and I don't know,
we've got one in Montgomery, Huntsville, Birmingham, Abel, the wholesale club operator,
we're a sales club, the views on Walmart.
If you look at what we refer to as the food and drug channel,
then you've got two real strong players in our state in that, and that's Kroger and Publix.
Both phenomenal operators, we have the unfortunate thing to be able to compete against both of those guys.
But when Nixie's still a major player in our state, typically those two,
if you're in a market where Kroger and Publix is at, it becomes pretty challenging to beat that perfect channel store.
Nixie still is doing good at some markets here.
Kroger is exceptionally good in much larger stores and personalized marketing.
Publix is just a good operator. I have a lot of respect for both of those companies.
There are a lot of guys like me left. There are a lot of independent grocers.
Dr. Weiss said, if you ask them up there, there are a lot of guys up there.
We're very blessed in our state to have two things that make that possible.
We have a very, very strong wholesale supply community.
I was in Arkansas last week, and those guys have really one choice out there.
In Alabama, we have five, and we have a total of eight distribution centers.
So not only do you have choices, there's also geography that you can get product from.
All very good companies. That's what allowed us to have such a strong independent sector in Alabama.
The second thing is, is the work that Ellie Tater does at Alabama Grocer Association.
Great, great representative of us in the industry, especially when you get into the governmental relations that Dr. Weiss just talked about.
This is on the forefront of that. So those two things combined have allowed to have a very robust independent grocer segment in our state.
The drug stores, of course, you've got Walgreens and CVS. One builds on one corner, one builds on the other corner.
And both a lot of food, some of them those stores.
Same thing, a dollar general and family dollar. You might have saw a press last year.
Family dollar and family dollar and dollar tree murders so to speak.
A hundred players in that channel. A lot of things all there.
Look at what we call the limited assortment group, which is all these, some of you might know of them.
We're safe a lot. We want those a lot.
Much more limited assortment, but very much a price operator.
The real growth vehicles in our industry are coming out of the fresh and specialty, but in discussion about organic.
All of you familiar with Whole Foods, and that's been really the pioneer in the industry, so to speak. A new player now called Sprouts Farmers' Markets.
We've got a couple of stores in Birmingham, one in Pennsylvania.
Sprouts has really turned that model upside down, and they've been extremely, extremely successful selling produce very, very cheap.
I'm going to talk a little bit about this whole baggy proposition in our business today.
Herf fairs here in Auburn got fresh market around the state some, and then Trader Joe's is going to do that.
So all those are kind of in that fresh specialty space in there.
Convenience stores is a very much a growing segment.
You know, in Alabama, we've got a lot of circle case stores. You've got a lot of map post stores.
Then we get into the fact of food service.
And if you start looking at your products, as Dr. Reese and some others have just said, guys start looking at restaurants.
Last year was the first year that restaurant sales ever exceeded grocery store sales.
It's about 52-48 now, and that's the first time that's ever happened.
So that shows you this generation that's coming up don't cook, don't have time to cook.
The way I frame that up is that when I grew up, my mother cooked dinner every night,
and then we went out to eat on the weekends as a truth.
In today's environment, you go out to eat every night, and your mother cooks on the weekend for a treatment.
So, and that sort of has had an effect on our industry and eventually into the products of what you got yourself.
And then we got this little animal out there called Amazon.com.
And what they are doing to the retail industry in general,
the about two days after Thanksgiving, my wife says, I am through Christmas shopping.
You haven't been to the mall yet.
Well, from that day, for the next 25 days, when I came home to work,
there was several packages with Amazon for porch.
And that's how Christmas came to us.
So that's just the movement that we see.
Some of the macro trends that we are dealing with,
it's not a fabulous presentation a few weeks ago from the CEO of a chain in Texas that I really respect.
And he shared the fact that there is been no growth in median family income.
And actually in 2008 recession, it has now decreased.
So people have more stuff with less dollars, which is why you see some of the debt out there.
Now that gets down to change all of us.
So we have less money to spend.
And so that certainly affects people's buying habits.
Involved in a lot of community work and unfortunate work with some community developers,
one of the things you also see on the national trend is people are moving back to the cities.
We start to see some real decline in some of the rural areas out there,
some of that's been driven by jobs and economics, still some very great small towns in Alabama.
If you start going to some of the major cities, you go to Montgomery now.
Huge revitalization in Montgomery, people are moving back downtown.
Huntsville, Birmingham, those things.
So you got a lot of people moving back into these cities.
Certainly in the name of people that I just talked about, increasing competition.
We are no longer in the environment and retail food industry that we refer to as competitive.
We're now in what we refer to as hyper-competitive.
It used to be our grocery store versus Winn-Dixie or Kroger or something like that.
It's now our grocery store versus those guys versus Walmart,
versus Target, versus Dollar General, versus Restaurants, versus Amazon,
and all the channels of food.
There has been a desire to move towards smaller stores.
A lot of people have grown disenchanted with 200,000 square foot Walmart supermarkets.
And that's been some of the challenges they've had.
You see Walmart moving to a box now, it's about 40,000 feet.
We have two of them here in town on the same street.
So they see the growth in that and all those things.
Very much increased America is a very, very diverse nation now.
And when that diversity comes, it's a tremendous amount.
And things like that.
You're seeing much more people talk about sriracha and things like that.
Certainly the desire to have more products.
The Cooking Channel has spawned a real revolution in different recipes and flavors and stuff like that.
A lot of that with the ethnic groups, a lot of heritage, a lot of history in food.
Even though we may be cooking the less, if it's a meal at home, the history and the heritage
that I learned from my mother, my grandmother, or my aunt or some of that,
that's still very prevalent in the meals that are prepared today.
Health and wellness is huge.
It is just the largest growing segment right now in the food industry.
People continue to look for fried chicken that's only got four calories in the sun.
But it continues to move.
And that's a real growth in some of the what we refer to as consumer product group movements out there.
And so if you're in that space, if your product is in that space,
it is a good time for you to be there because it is really a growth area.
Technology is big.
Online shopping, a store is small as ours.
We start online shopping and delivery Monday of next week.
So you can go to our website.
You can click on there and you can go to our page.
You can shop for $9.95.
I'll come to your house for $4.95.
You can pull up in front of the store and we'll put your car out there.
So that has now gotten down to the level that is affordable even for a guy like me.
We are now in the term that the industry uses is we're now in something called the omnichannel area of business now where we...
Everything is on the consumer side now.
We may want to do things this way.
At the end of the day, there is so much information.
There are so many choices out there that all the momentum and all the thinkers on the side of the consumer.
So the retail is we're having to meet the customer wherever that may be.
Whether it's in the brick and mortar store, whether it's online, whether it's at their house, whether it's somewhere like that.
So that's something you continue to have to think about as you market your products and sell your products.
Where do I have to meet the customer path to get that?
And of course, not to get Dr. Mies' blood pressure back up again,
government regulations are just,
Ellie will spend the next three hours discussing that which she is up here.
I will say, I will take a small step up on the sub-cocks there.
I appreciate Dr. Mies' comments.
We have the most amazing food industry ever, ever, ever.
There's not a person in our industry that has any desire to make someone sick.
Someone's family, their children or something like that.
So, you know, food bay, that kind of hype as far as I'm concerned.
But, you know, the regulations in place, our industry is fine with those things.
We want to do it like that.
The problem is the process to get there, to do that.
I just heard all the confusion.
You know, the people that write this stuff and think this stuff,
they never took the common sense class in school.
So, we're all for everything being safe and documentation and all those things.
But you do get to the point where everything like that that we do
and you touch, either in your world or my world, as a cost to the product.
And ultimately, consumers got that.
So, we have a great, great, great food industry out there.
We think of all the foods consumed in America, whether it's cooked at home,
whether it's cooked at restaurants and whatever.
That is not to negate the food safety issues that have and the tragedies behind those.
It doesn't even register on the scale of being the amount of food that's shipped out there.
I think that we would all say that we have a great system out there.
Not perfect, but people that are really trying to do the right thing
and governments are trying to do sometimes.
Kind of down now on some micro trends.
Right now in our business and if our poultry folks are in here,
deflation has been really tough.
We have seen a vast fall in protein, milk, eggs and the dairy products there.
We're selling more stuff we did last year.
It rings up for the last of the cash register up there.
We were selling leg quarters of chicken at 29 cents a pound about a few months ago.
And last year it may be 59 cents a pound.
Kind of back to the poultry industry.
I never thought we'd get 29 cents a pound for a leg,
five and two ninety-nine for a wing.
That's attributed to a wing place in the corner of America.
But we have seen some deflation and that certainly affects our business.
And again, it's going to trickle down to the producers.
Fuel prices, you'll throw rocks at me when I tell you this,
but I love $4 gas.
That puts people back in the grocery store and back cooking at home.
When it drops to $1.49, you can't get in the restaurant.
I mean, it gets down to 41% of my business is on SNAP benefits and things like that.
The rest of it we serve a fairly low, middle income customer base.
Typical supermarket in America, you know,
all of us in the South are stronger than me, you know,
comes from being an SEC footballer, you're a carnivore.
So, but we, you know, typical supermarket in America,
18, 19% of businesses means almost 50% of our hours in our store.
You see that and you get down to $1.49 a cent gas
and you still see people like, I'm not going to buy a steak,
I'm going for the four for four deal at Arby's over there somewhere.
When now that's got back in your world again,
where your product, which may be an ingredient or something to cook something,
is, you know, if it's not on immediate Arby's somewhere,
then you have a little challenge with that.
So, you know, fuel, deflation and fuel prices,
we have, we've had sort of a buff those this year,
we've seen an uptick in our business just for about the 50 cents a gallon jump
in fuel prices when it went back to about $2.
We've already seen people back in the store again out there.
A little bit real quick about ways to sell your products.
Always, always get amused when I had some guys in a week before last
and got them from Seattle and now they do not sell hot sauce
and barbecue sauce in Seattle, Washington.
There's got to be like two sacks full of stuff.
They are made at the barbecue sauces and things that are made in Alabama.
So, you know, there's some great products you all make
and I know you're very diverse into things that you do make.
There are still all those channels I know and opportunities for you to sell your product out there.
So, how do you get into there?
The Dr. Weiss is going to be pretty tough.
You know, what gets easier is you get into chains that, you know, are a little smaller or whatever.
Ellen's going to talk a lot about some ways that you can do that.
I want to get a bunch into that. There's still good brokers left in Alabama.
Trade shows, especially trade shows are very good things for you all to attend.
The fancy food show, if your product fits into that, is huge.
It is still just thousands of people attend that.
And so, I have a friend in Kansas City with Missouri.
He's got a great meat store and the truck that pulls up in front of this store
and the more anybody else is UBS. A lot of the specialty products he buys,
he buys a case or two at a time.
We guys like you in the shift to the UBS.
So, that's the way.
Online, it's still going to be huge.
You know, I think that Amazon and people like that,
I know a guy in Virginia's got a huge bakery processing facility.
He's in about 30 states now.
He's selling this stuff on Amazon.
If he's not shipping to a retail store in your community,
he used to live on Amazon if you want that.
Great discussion about food safety.
I know it's confusing and all the things I can do this year,
but I can't do that.
And again, back to the comments that we all want it to be safe.
I mean, why in the world do you ever want to hurt somebody
living in the world of litigation?
And, you know, my error rate for food safety
and the issue of your error rate for food safety is one.
We're done.
Okay.
I can't survive what Bluebell did.
And they almost did.
And so, we just have all got in.
I mean, I worry about my employees and their safety
and people rob banks in the middle of the day and stuff like that.
Right behind that, the biggest fear I have in life
is some sort of food oil.
And there's so much stuff that you just can't.
We got area inspector knowing the man and all those things
that we've taken to food safety tests and all that stuff.
There's a lot of moving parts out there.
There's a tremendous amount of moving parts.
So, all of us have got to do our part in this chain
where there's you guys making something,
be selling it or whoever to be safe out there.
We live in a world today also.
I'll talk a little bit about value and pricing.
We live in a world today where a consumer out there
who says, I want it.
I want it right now.
And I'm going to buy for the cheapest price I can
no matter what you do.
You hear the stories of people going to Best Buy
and looking at the product and taking photos
and talking to the salesman for 30 minutes.
You go back home and buy it on Amazon and say 20 bucks.
That's a good symbol that we serve today.
You got a lot of time.
You got a lot of effort.
You got expense in your business.
I know there was going to be a discussion about capital
and working things and things like that.
But you got to get that back and you got to make profit.
You also got to think about the fact that
you can make 100% off your product.
If you don't sell it, zero or 100% is zero.
So you got to find a place in there somewhere
where you have a fair return on your business, on your product.
But it's a price point that will move it.
We have two wonderful bakery on the get down to the details.
Bakery suppliers in Alabama.
One, who's been out for a long time, makes a great product.
In my opinion, she's priced herself out of the market now.
She won't suggest almost $24 for a cake.
I'm even embarrassed to pass that.
We sell it for $19.99.
Another supplier in the state who makes a very similar product
is very good, very similar to that.
She's in this $12 range and she's selling those things
like nobody's business out there.
Always remember when you're looking at things like that,
you're taking money to the bank.
You can't take percentages to the bank.
When you fill the bank and you write 20% on an audit slip,
the bank will look at you very fun.
With $20 on there, then he'll be glad to accept that.
Somewhere in there for each of you, you've got to find that spot
where, how can I make this product move and sell
and get dollars back?
And the two other things I put in there.
That's something we just live in that workplace
to where there's a suit right there with all the choices.
A few things, and I will hustle it.
Ellie and Tom will go back with some of the stuff
that Chuck talked about a little bit.
Let me tell you, I appreciate greatly
what each one of you are doing.
America needs all of us.
America needs small businesses.
What built the country is what will keep the country going
for years to come, with all due respect to the General Motors
and the Apple people of the world and all that stuff.
And America's built small businesses
and we need to continue to grow that segment.
It takes a lot of fire in your belly to get up every morning
and to worry about the things that Chuck worries about
and things that I deal with and things like that.
You guys all have a passion to do what you do.
It's a dream, it's a passion to do that.
I admire all of you and I appreciate what you do in there
and what you do in Ninja there.
If you find yourself in a really unique industry,
we get to the food industry because we connect
with more people than anybody else out there.
You go to the hardware store,
somebody wants some blue moon and you need a hammer
or some nails and stuff.
Eat the day, which is what my competitors have now figured out
about the government party.
Eat when you do anything else.
See, I have a great opportunity to connect with people.
Make sure in the things you do and all the financial things
and all this litany of stores,
I just told you, you can just sell your podcast.
Don't ever forget to tell your story.
People still do business with people.
Don't ever forget that when you talk to folks
and you tell people who you are and what you do
and tell them why you do it.
We survive two ways in our store.
We like to get all these things.
We sell a lot of meat and we work in our community very hard.
Our community knows what we do.
Don't ever be ashamed to tell people who you are
and what you stand for and what you value.
That still matters in this world today.
I will tell you, it is some of the community work
I have been doing and I have learned a tremendous amount
about the millennial generation.
I think some of you guys may follow that category.
I'm way past that category.
I will tell you that this generation coming up
with millennials that are extremely,
extremely interested in sustainability.
They're extremely interested in values.
They're interested in what's happening in their world.
That customer looks for who you are.
You may have a great sauce, but who are you?
What do you do with the people that make this sauce?
How do you treat them?
What do you do with the environment?
How do you kill the people?
You know, to make the corporations you got
or something like that.
So that's just something that you really think
you're an amazing group of people and what you do.
They have the guts to do it against all the things
that are all against that.
But carry your story and think about,
you know, this generation is coming up.
Back to something that took place earlier today.
When I first graduated out of high school,
I decided to move out on my own.
So my mother gave me an artificial plant
and told me I'd never kill it.
The day I came home from work,
it was already been over in the cellar,
so I can't grow anything.
I will tell you that on the list of great art streams,
the list of people I have the greatest admiration for
are small business people, especially the farmers.
We've got to know a lot of these guys
through some of the farmers markets
and some of the stuff that we buy and direct in our store.
I would give up and walk away.
And these guys do not.
It's who they are.
It's what they do.
It's what their families do.
They have a bad year.
They get up and do it again next year.
They're amazing.
Probably as we don't have enough of them,
especially in this state.
I had a guy that I met at Farmers Market
out of South Alabama.
He grows incredible products down there.
And so I went to the market,
just walked up to this thing.
I said, look, I got this little grocery store.
I like to buy a bunch of stuff from you.
I think your products are good.
What can we do?
That would be two cents worth of anything.
Nothing.
I don't get through this guy.
So I kept on, kept on, kept on.
So finally, I stood there until the market ended.
And I said, I will buy everything you did not sell
to that, if you would just talk to me
and help me understand what it is that you're
opposed to doing business with a guy like me.
So I broke a guy check for everything he had
with a normal band, so they started talking.
Well, let me respect.
Walmart had a home with a guy out in the dry.
And they quit farming, except for a few acres
that this guy could grow enough stuff
to sell at Farmers Market
to make a good living for him and his family.
I'm not trying to throw rocks at Walmart.
I like it, but I'm not going to.
But I'm just telling you that a lot of what's
happening in farming in our state,
people have got connected with some people
that have done them very wrong.
He had guys like me that had done him wrong.
So that's the relationship that I know
you've got to work on in some shape or fashion.
You certainly have got its hard work.
It's got a generation that doesn't want to work that hard.
But we've got to grow that segment in our state
for all of us sitting in this room here.
You want to read a book I thought was fascinating
and in the scary.
There's a book called Full Planet Empty Place.
If you're wondering that.
And it talks about the fact that our world is growing
at a rate that we will not be able to sustain
and feed if we don't start growing some stuff.
There's a lot of technology out there.
There's a lot of people that are doing some smart things
out there growing some stuff.
We need to promote that and get that going in Alabama.
And I know that.
I wish I had a solution to that.
And there are many people smart than me to get to that point.
But I don't have something that we need to do.
I made a comment about we're shifting stuff
all the way from California to freight involved with that.
Days of loss of freshness and faulty loss of that.
A state by state.
No matter what side of the issue you come out on.
A state that just voted to have a $15 an hour in the wage.
Which is fine.
Except for that it's not having an effect
on the price of that product.
Even if you pay $15 an hour in Alabama
you don't have to ship it as far.
So, you know, that's just something again,
I haven't had a lot of thoughts on addressing that.
But I am appreciate the fact that you brought that up.
And I just think it's a huge need in our state.
So that's a little bit about a little rambling
about the retail grocery business
and kind of the things that are affecting that
and some of those things there.
So, that's all I have. Any questions or anything?
You mentioned especially food association and expo.
Something you'd recommend.
Yeah, most of what I've seen, you know,
we don't follow on that channel.
We get pop up with our grocery association one year.
And I did see just there's a tremendous,
tremendous amount of small producers there
making products to get a booth.
And they've got an audience of just thousands and thousands
of that type of retail there.
So, there's a lot of traffic there.
And I don't know how expensive it would be
to have a place like that.
But I do know there is a tremendous amount.
A big one now is this natural organic show.
There's one out in the west.
The fancy food show is in Chicago that they hold,
I think it's hooked with SUSSA,
the Department of Agriculture.
And I know that there used to be some ramp monies
that startup companies could get to go to that show.
And so if you talk to the Department of Agriculture,
they could probably get you hooked up with SUSSA,
but there was ramp monies that were available
to go to that show.
And I don't think that they would pay for your travel,
but I think that they would pay for the booth.
And the booths are fairly expensive
to be able to go to that.
A lot of people, again, it's just that whole
natural organic, especially,
the Department of Agriculture's more pro Cheerios,
it's kind of flat.
Everything else is, you know,
it's a thing that's successful for your growth.
Yes?
I have a question about your delivery.
I talked with Chef, this is sort of a part of my day job question.
But have you thought about doing non-perishable deliveries
going on Amazon or shipping some products?
Yeah, I mean, kind of address that.
We would ship anything out of our store
that we sell in the store.
So it's everything, meat produce and all those things like it.
We've got the controls put in place.
Make sure it stays in proper temperatures
to deliver the process and all that stuff there.
You know, as far as how far we will reach out
from the delivery standpoint,
you know, we're still kind of up in the air on that.
I will tell you that I am working with some folks
at Auburn University to look at trying to solve
some food insecurity issues by using mobile delivery.
We have a very fascinating conversation with them.
So that's here, as far as shipping things
like Amazon through the mail or something like that,
I don't know that we would have any offerings, so to speak,
that would be anything that could be
that the neighborhood grocery stores were down the street.
A friend in Kansas City ship and steaks all over the country.
So I mean, I guess something like that is possible.
I will tell you that everybody who says
they're going to buy something offline for me
and have it delivered every couple of store,
it would be the largest sales increase we have ever had
since we've been in business.
So I've just had been stunned at the amount of stuff
we got to hear from people who just quite frankly
hate the grocery store.
They hate buying, they hate publics, they hate product,
they hate everybody.
It's just not something on the list of enjoyment
that she would have done.
It's kind of like ripping out grocery store.
And the same thing there.
So we see a lot of people that just don't,
a lot of people just can't get to the store.
I know on our social media page, like he said,
she was so tired of feeding her kids crap
from a fast food restaurant or out of a convenience store
because they couldn't get to the store.
We like people like that.
We've had, I try to confine my delivery area
to the local I couldn't get with.
And so we have people from Auburn calling
and it is low ladies who have no way to address the store.
We show people, we always show the bus,
we actually go and pick up someone
and bring them to the store and shop and take them back.
So we're already doing some things.
This now moves to the next round of that.
So how do you tell this little lady you used to get?
You know those people having to pay $50
for somebody to go to the grocery store for them out there.
So that's the second group of here.
And then we've heard a tremendous amount
from people calling us about their parents
who are in that same situation.
This is a friend of mine in Philadelphia.
I'll show you how technology can affect all our business.
This is my friend of mine in Philadelphia.
A woman in Atlanta, Georgia calls her mother
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and says,
what do you need from the grocery store?
The mother says, I need milk, bread, eggs,
she sits on her computer in Atlanta,
orders her mother's groceries from my friend in Philadelphia
store who then takes them and delivers them
to her mother up the street from here in Philadelphia.
So those are the kind of things you begin to see
the technology solve that.
Really interested in solving, helping solve it.
Ellie's been big on this and the great thing
about fresh food, financing, issue and access and all that.
I'm really fascinated by getting food to areas
that are struggling to get that especially fresher.
It's tough to run a brick and mortar grocery store.
It takes a lot of business.
You've got very small margins.
You've got to turn all that product.
You just can't go at people in this little town
about 700 people who's begging me to come there.
Because I can't come there and cut meat
and all these things and survive in that thing.
Maybe I can reach them this way.
So that's kind of where we end up in the brick and mortar
there.
Anything else?
The farmer that you bought all of this stuff.
Did you find anything later from him?
Oh yeah, we had direct questions here.
But I had to get past that point.
There's a general mistrust
and that's why we tried to say
we're going to pay you up front.
This is what the price is going to be.
I can go to Atlanta and buy without any healing.
The guy went through the issue with Walmart.
He's got guys like me,
guys in my world,
you're writing a bad cheque on me.
It meant a lot to the guy.
My cheque cleared.
And you've got people who deliver
and he's gone there and they go,
I got a lot of the way that it looks.
You know, you're on the 15th,
I'll give you the key.
The guy's already driven two hours to get up there.
So that's a real issue.
You probably see some of that too.
I'm arguing for what you're doing as far as
you just got to build those relationships.
We desperately, as a nation,
need those people out there.
Thank you.
