Light, Shipments and Tags - It's All a Lot of Work

DH had a very busy morning yesterday. He did a little bit of shoveling on the driveway, clearing away the light snow we got overnight, then, after breakfast, he headed over to the shop, dropped off his things, and headed over to the hardware store to get a new snow rake. By the end of the morning, he had purchased a new snow rake, some large bags of salt for home and shop to help us keep sidewalk ice to a minimum, and another box of fluorescent light bulbs for the shop. 

We have three long rows of these fixtures in the main floor 
of the store, and two long rows of them in the basement level. 
They're not classy, but they give good light. The bulbs 
are eight feet long, very unwieldy to move around easily, 
and the ballasts need to be changed over to a new 
style. We're still in the process of doing that. 

Next week I'll need to take some of our burnt out bulbs back to the hardware store and turn them in for recycling. My neighborhood hardware store isn't in business any more (they retired in early spring - good timing!), so I now have to drive my bulbs to the big-box store for recycling. It'll be a mess, but I'll have to make it work. 

For many years now, we've had a major 
sales event at the end of the year. It's a 
"Thank You" to our customers as well as 
a top-off of cash into our till for the 
year. 

The first day of our year-end mega-sale went quite well. I even was lucky enough to have a customer buy several items of jewelry for his wife, and he didn't even have a coupon, so no discounts on a $700+ sale. Huzzah! That made up for the professional who purchased a lot of antique beads and precious metal components using a coupon - items that would normally NEVER be discounted. 

Each of our one-inch-square price tags 
has to have our computer number, product 
description, part number, country of 
origin and price. Although I can "ditto" 
by line, when I'm entering 1000's 
of tags by hand, it's very time 
consuming. 

Of course, just to add to the mess, we got a major shipment in the door and DH started to receive the items into the computer at the same time that I selling merchandise to customers. We run an ANCIENT and specialized computer system at the shop, and I live each day with fingers crossed that it will live another day. Fortunately, it managed to trudge through, and now I have several days of work generating price tags for each of the items - something that used to be done automatically by our sales and inventory program until it had a hiccup earlier this year. Since that time, price tags have to be generated by hand. *sigh* 

Still, it was a good first day. I also got one more holiday card in the mail when I got home. I'll be going through them and making sure I acknowledge each one late this week or early next. They're all beautiful and I love each and every one of them. They look amazing stretched across my mantle and give me great joy. On that note, I'm off to start cooking breakfast and then head off to the shop. No rest for the weary, it's Day 2 of our three-day sale. As always, please be kind, stay safe, and wear your mask. I'll be back tomorrow.