Last more holiday 2013 pictures

More Holiday 2013 Pictures

Holiday 2013 Pictures

Recent Reading

It's all a matter of perspective. Wal-Mart: hiring 55,000 holiday workers. Amazon: hiring 70,000. Zingerman's Mail Order: 500 (we're not in the article).

Explaining the war on coal with a brilliant, brief analogy to restaurant trash. 

Understanding the world through really cool maps. Number 6 and 17 blew my mind.

The third stage of holiday grief

December 19, 2012

The 3 Stages of Mail Order Holiday Grief
1. Hiring grief: will we get enough people

2. Order grief: will we get enough sales

3. Shipping grief: will we ship them all out the door on time

The third stage has arrived. You can tell it's in effect when someone (Riki) says something like "Thank God it's Tuesday. It was Monday for three whole days."

We're now quickly rolling through the signposts of the last phase of holiday grief. The deadline for shipping a box to arrive with UPS ground shipping has passed. The deadline for 2 day shipping is gone. The deadline for overnight packages looms. Then there's overnight with Saturday delivery on Friday, select zip codes only, sorry!

This year Christmas falls on a Tuesday, the absolute worst day of the week for us mail orderers, especially those of us in the food business. Perishable foods don't like to travel over the weekend. It means the last day for most folks to ship for Christmas is today, Thursday, for delivery on Friday, five full days before Christmas. Bah humbug!

OK, now for the crazy numbers. We've been packing orders at a rate of one every 9 seconds 24/7 the last 10 days (with a short break for breath on Friday). Nine per second means 400 boxes per hour. Back in 1992, the first year I did a mail order Christmas, we shipped 113 boxes total on the biggest day. (It almost broke me.) This year it was 12,000, the week will total over 30,000 boxes. To put it in perspective, that's equal to what we shipped in June, July and August combined. 

You might have noticed I didn't mention much about grief. That's because we kind of skipped the grief part of the third stage this year. Outside of our order releaase computer that refused to work the night shift (it crashed in the evening and started back to work each morning) most everything hummed along. We're hand wrapping bread, cutting cheese to order, and making every gift one at a time just in time.

Friday afternoon it will go ghost quiet, a holiday cliff we cross every year and whose predictability does not make it feel any less eerie. The phones will go quiet. The boxes will be gone. The food will be absent. The shelves will be empty. Most of the crew will have left. Until then we hum with the sound of a hundred  people gathering food and stacking boxes into an endless stream of fifty foot UPS trailers.

The second stage of holiday grief

Our forecast board on December 17, 2012. We update it every day at 11:30.

The 3 Stages of Mail Order Holiday Grief
1. Hiring grief: will we get enough people

2. Order grief: will we get enough sales

3. Shipping grief: will we ship them all out the door on time

When we stop worrying about hiring enough people and start fretting about whether orders will come in we know we've left stage one and entered the second stage of holiday grief at Zingerman's Mail Order.

Half our year's sales arrive in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. This year that means about $5 million. The daily volume ramps up quickly. Where we're used to taking tens of thousands of dollars in orders a day we leap into taking hundreds of thousands a day in early December.

Because of a few factors — Thanksgiving's date, what day of the week Christmas falls on, how many weekends are in between each, when catalogs arrive in home — the flow of orders, or what we call "The Curve," is always different. That's true all year long, of course. It's just at this time of year small variations result in huge shifts of dollars. And huge shifts of stress.

This year's curve was great in December's first week, crappy in the second week, a little better in the third. Top that off with a whopper of a math miscalculation and we had a surge of holiday stress right around December 8th. We were off by 10 or 20% a day, which meant daily misses of up to $40,000.  By December 12th, when we discovered our math error, it had partly passed. On December 14th we had a $321,000 day, our second biggest ever — over half the sales of an entire month, typically — the grief was officially over.

On to stage 3.

The first stage of holiday grief

My partner Tom gave ZMO a grand gift this holiday in that he clearly defined our three stages of holiday grief. These are what we go through every holiday. Probably every mail order company has them.

1. Hiring grief: will we get enough people

2. Order grief: will we get enough sales

3. Shipping grief: will we ship them all out the door on time

We just finished stage one and are firmly in stage two. Looking back at stage one we hired 400 people on top of the 60 regular crew, making us 460 strong this December. I just read that total seasonal hiring in the U.S. is 760,000 so we can count ourselves as .05% of that!

If you are a numbers nerd here are more to feast on. We spent $2,000 on help wanted ads. We took in 1,300 applications. That's a lot, but it's 600 less than last year when we hired the same number of people. Of the 400 hires, 100 help customers on phones and email (the office pictured above) and the other 300 work with the food, making the boxes and getting them out the door.  About 15% of this year's crew were folks who worked with us before. 

We hired everyone in 17 sessions. Each session has a kind of skills obstacle course with feats of strength, kind of like Festivus. For the service crew the obstacle course tests were typing, writing, a 4 question interview and a listen-in session on a live call to see if they want to opt out and not take the job (some people do). For the production crew the tests were lifting 20 pounds, picking cards by a set of codes, walking to a fast pace, computer scanning and, when we're hiring captain supervisors, we do a 4 question interview.

Holiday Cover Winner

 

The winner of our catalog cover contest begins arriving in homes this week. This was the voters' favorite—and mine. Ryan let go and Saul Bass got a little bedazzled.

Underployment

Unemployment figures — currently running around 15% in Michigan, about half that in Ann Arbor  — count people who are actively looking for a job. If you stop looking you're no longer considered unemployed. If you have a job that's not full time, or not as full time as you want, you're not considered unemployed either.

The last group are the folks who, in my personal lexicon, I call underployed. They'd like to work more but they can't. The work isn't there.

This December, if you you talked to the temporary crew who worked at ZMO, you probably found lots of the underployed. I met a few:

There was a self-employed man who ran his own moving, cleaning and landscaping business. It was slow so he came to work for us (plus he wanted to see how we did what we did).

There was an Michigan MBA who has her own consultancy. It was a little slow. She also wanted a peek inside Zingerman's.

There was a graphic designer whose own business was a little slow. He always thought it'd be interesting to see how we worked.

There was a person who worked for a major resort hotel on Mackinaw Island. December is a slow season for island resorts on the Great Lakes.Guess why she applied? Same story: she knew about Zingerman's and wanted to work "inside."

We were certainly blessed, in a sad and perverse way, with an abundance of riches in our crew this December. Unemployment and underployment were rampant. In the next few years, unemployment may subside. But when you’re a good company you can often find the underployed. They're interested in who we are, how we work. The experience they had this year may mean some come back. Or they’ll tell other underployed friends.

My favorite crew story wasn't about underployment, though. There was one man who had a full time job. He worked for us for only one reason: to buy a ring so he could — in his words,"properly" — ask his girl of ten years to be his bride.