For 20 years Catskill Native Nursery has been closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays to walk-in traffic. Though those of you who may have shown up, forgetting about our closed days, saw that there were actually workers around and most of the time we allowed you to come in and shop. But mostly we used those days to get the nursery restocked and organized and cleaned up for our “open” days. As well as do deliveries and pickup plants from other growers and run personal errands. And, of course, our knowledgable “plant geek” staff all need a couple days off to recharge. “Why not find more staff to work your closed days” was often suggested to us, but knowledgable “plant geeks” are hard to find. When good-natured suggestions about how to run the business persisted we finally had to point out “We’re not Walmart” – we simply are not going to be open 7 days a week 12 hours a day.
Now we find ourselves in “Terra Incognito” trying to run what has become an “Amazon” plant warehouse. Most of our day is spent running around picking orders and trying to find the one plant on the order that seems to have disappeared. We are not set up to be a warehouse. We’re pretty well organized, but to run a warehouse efficiently it needs to be perfectly organized not pretty well organized. Then there are Tuesdays and Wednesdays. On-line stores of course are open 7 days a week 24 hours a day. Orders come in 7 days a week 24 hours a day. But we are still operating on our pre-warehouse schedule. We need Tuesdays and Wednesdays to make deliveries, sort out problems with orders that have cropped up over the previous 5 days, catch up on things that need to be done for plants we are propagating and take some time off. So now we need to point out that “We are not Amazon.” If you place an order Monday night or Tuesday or Wednesday, it’s likely that we won’t even look at the order until Thursday. So we will be running a couple days longer fulfilling those orders than normal. This isn’t a complaint – so far everyone has been completely understanding about us sometimes taking a few days to get your order ready for pickup. I just wanted to clarify that there may be times it takes us a little longer than normal and to explain it will almost always be the case for orders placed midweek.