11:40 – I haven’t shut down the old system yet, but I’m doing pretty much everything now on the new one. Science kit sales have started to slow down a bit now. We’re shipping four or five a day at this point.
Speaking of shipping, USPS scared me yesterday. The regular guy had the day off, and I expected his replacement to be running very late. Danny usually arrives around 1600 to 1630 on Mondays, so with the holiday I figured the replacement might not get here until 1700 or 1730. As it turned out, it was 1850. Fortunately, I made it to the front door just as the guy was getting back in his truck. I shouted that I had boxes to be picked up. He’d just grabbed the letters from the mailbox, along with my notice poster that says in a huge font: “USPS Priority Mail box awaiting pickup. Please ring bell.” He was getting ready to drive away with our outgoing envelopes and the poster, but without the eight boxes I had ready for pickup. While he was loading my boxes into the back of his truck, another USPS truck pulled up behind him. I didn’t recognize either of the drivers, and I suspect they were both counter guys that had been pressed into service. The Tuesday after a Monday holiday is always all-hands-on-deck.
I’d better get to work on building more kits. We’re down to three of the CK01A chemistry kits and only one of the CK01B kits, and we might well get orders for all of those later today.
17:12 – And, sure enough, we’re now completely out of chemistry kits. Actually, our stock status is now -1 because I got an order from Canada a few minutes ago for a chemistry kit. Fortunately, I also just finished assembling two dozen sets of chemical bags for the chemistry kits, which is everything I need to build another 24 kits on the fly. This’d actually be a lot of fun if it weren’t so exhausting. In the first four days of this month, kit sales are already about 40% of what we sold all of last September.