Taylor Holdsworth

Writings on the intersections of architecture, experience design, and daily life.

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Market Traffic – A Summer Market Day in West Chester, PA

July 23rd, 2010 by Taylor
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Weather: Sunny, blue skies, humid and HOT – at 9:00 AM the temperature is already heading briskly upward from the mid-80’s to the mid-90’s.

Morning at the Market

After getting rained out torrentially on the previous Saturday, I got to complete my planned market site visit on the 17th. Every 45 minutes, give or take, I walked the market counting the number of people in each stand and taking a count of the people milling around in market area but not standing in any particular stand. It’s not a highly accurate method as there is plenty of room for over- or under- counting as people move around. I did not include dogs in my numbers but I did count each person individually so that a couple with a toddler would be counted as 3 not 1.

The graph below shows what the market traffic looks like. Each color represents a particular stand with the medium gray at the end assigned to the count of people milling about.

Market Traffic Graph

Some notes the I took on the traffic patterns observed on this day.

The affects of weather

Surprise! ;) Torrential rain definitely cuts into the market traffic. The +/-40 customers who braved the rain on 7/10 swelled to 140+ at the same time of day on the sunny summer morning.

Humid, sweltering weather makes everyone look pretty wilted – dogs, babies, greens, producers and customers alike.

… of product

Traffic for prepared foods/goods (pies – whoopee and otherwise, canned items, tea, salsas and hot sauces, bread, and handmade soap) is pretty steady throughout the market hours, perhaps because shoppers know that these items will be available no matter what time they come.

On the produce side there are noticeable peaks and valleys. Shopping peaks in early morning for vegetables and cut flowers which can dwindle or run out entirely for latecomers, especially early in the season or when weather is uncertain. This year, for instance, has been a tough one of ups and downs for some crops and farms in the area with the weather swinging from heavy rain to very hot sunny weather and back again. So on this particular Saturday, even the most fortunate and/or prepared vegetable growers ran low by the end of the morning.

Fruit turns out to have a different pattern. Berries, which come early and, being labor intensive to pick, are more scarce, draw long early lines at the beginning of the season when their only competition are early beets, cool weather loving lettuces, hardy kales, radishes, and finally broccoli. Peaches, plums, and apples – which come in greater numbers once they arrive – don’t always inspire competitive early morning shopping but do draw big crowds. (And no wonder… very sweet this year!) On this particular Saturday, traffic for both of the fruit producers peaked towards the end of the market as vegetables mounds got smaller. And of course, fruit that is newly in season is a big draw.

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Site Visit

July 9th, 2010 by Taylor
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Tomorrow I am planning on a little site research at the West Chester Growers Market to put some numbers around my impressions of the ebb and flow of crowds at the market and different stands. I think a little formal data collection is in order since I’m pretty sure my feelings about the relative crowds and the number of roadblocks on the way to my favorite stands is heavily colored by how much of a hurry I’m in, how hot it is, and whether I managed a proper weekend breakfast and the required second cup of coffee.

Think good thoughts for the weather, please! (The 100+ heat has given way to brooding humid rain/thunder showers.)

Along with the wonderful produce and goods, crowds have become a notable feature of this market. It’s a lot more effort to negotiate the market now than 7 years ago when I first moved to town.

While the crowds are a heartening sign that the market is flourishing, there is also a bit of “too much of a good thing” aspect to them. The bigger the line at a stand, the less time the farmer/maker has to have even a very short casual conversation with a market customer, or to talk about the details of their farming practices, or how they raise an animal or choose an ingredient for a soap or jam or tea. Not to mention, if you have no option but to shop the market at a busy time in the day, you may be forced to make choices about shopping at different stands or skipping a day.

One of the comments that stuck with me from the first of the interviews for this project was from Lisa at my fav North Star Orchard. During our conversation, Lisa mentioned that one of the reasons they started their e-mail newsletter initially was to keep up conversations with customers, even if it’s somewhat one-sided (let’s be geeky… asynchronous), that were becoming harder to have at market as the markets got busier.

At least in my case, I completely agree with her thinking that one reason people come to the farmers market is to have a connection with the growers who they buy from. There are after all, other venues to get together with friends and neighbors that don’t involve a hot, fidgety line of local strawberry addicts.

So tomorrow’s plan is easy: every 30 minutes from 9 to 1 I’ll make a round of the market in semi-stealth and count the line at each stand, jot down a few notes about the demographics and number of feet (there are a lot of dogs at market!) of the line members, and maybe take a picture for posterity.

Links:

Both the growers market and North Start Orchards have e-mail newsletters If you would like to sign up to check them out. Sign up for North Star’s e-mail newsletter on their website or for the market’s newsletter on the lower left hand corner of the market site. Neither list is shared and both are low volume.

Or, see another side of the aspect of producer-consumer conversations on some market-related Facebook fan pages: for the market, the orchard, and another market vendor – Chile Spot.

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All That Free Time – A Project Introduction

July 5th, 2010 by Taylor
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One of the items on my original list of things to do during my working sabbatical from corporate, in-house experience design was to start up some personal research projects. I wanted to spend time with feel-good topics and to try out new techniques of interviewing and analysis that simply didn’t fit well with the requirements of my company’s projects.

The list of “things-to-do-with-all-my-reclaimed-commuting-time” is spectacularly long. I figured that simply recapturing two hours a day of car commuting time would allow me to pick items off this expansive list at blazing speed while leaving plenty of time for consulting work.

Umm. Yeah.

A year and a half later, I find my long list still quite long indeed. The demands of independent consulting have easily filled much of that commuting time. And yes, I confess, enjoying the luxury of cooking decent, soul-nourishing weekday meals has filled in a lot of the rest.

Today, finally, I would like to introduce one project that I hope to keep going over the next few months: a series of interviews and case studies of how and why producers and consumers in my local farmer’s market community communicate with each other.

Originally my statement was much more tech focused “Identify how small independent family farms and CSA’s are using technology to reach individual consumers directly to extend their markets. Research will include a competitive review of websites, interviews with local (Chester County, SE PA) farmers and end-users. Intended result of the research is to produce a report reviewing of the research findings and recommendations on tools that might help link consumers directly to food producers.” Very. Official.

I still hope to glean some insights around the tech focused part of the original statement, but I already see that the richness of the ecology around just my local market makes this a hopeless constraint. In the end, I think that I will mostly be telling stories of the market with the occasional interlude of geeky, “digital tomfoolery” (to borrow a phrase from one interviewee.)

About “My” Market

The West Chester Growers Market was conceived of in 1994 by a group of local farmers – 4 of whom are still selling at the market. It is distinguished by being a strictly producer-only market ; vendors must live locally and make or grow themselves anything that the sell at market. It is also somewhat unusual in that it is producer-run, rather than being sponsored by a locality or non-profit, and so is not responsible to a governing body or board. The market takes place from 9 to 1 each Saturday in a parking lot just a block off the center of town from May to December. 2010 saw a first foray into monthly winter markets. In addition to a web site, the market has an e-mail newsletter, Facebook page, Twitter stream, and market blog.

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