You pick on Friday for a Saturday you cannot see.
Let people order and pay through the week, then cut to a list on Friday and hand it over at the market. What is spoken for before you pick it does not come home in the van.
Your name is all it takes. Stock, collection windows and prices are screens once you are in.
You are cutting for a Saturday nobody can see yet.
Everything about a market day is decided before it happens, on nothing but last week and the weather forecast. Orders here land all through the week and close the evening before, so by the time you are in the field on Friday morning you are picking to a list. The list is not a forecast. It is people who have already paid.
What goes back in the crates is money you already spent.
Seed, water, the bed it grew in and the hours you put into it — all of that is spent long before the table goes up, and none of it comes back when the tomatoes travel home. Anything reserved before you cut it is sold. The rest is the number you were always going to have to guess at, and it is now a smaller one.
Four hours, once a week, and the weather gets a vote.
A market is a very small window to put a whole week's work through, and rain closes it. An order taken on Wednesday and paid on Wednesday is paid whatever Saturday turns out to be. People come and collect it in the window you set, because they have already bought it.
The good stuff is gone by nine and your regulars arrive at eleven.
Four dozen eggs is four dozen, and the person who has bought them every week for a year loses them to whoever got there first. The count here is real: it comes down the moment somebody reserves, one order at a time, so the same dozen cannot be sold twice and the people who plan ahead can actually get the thing they came for.
You have sold to the same face for two years and never learned their name.
Cash tells you nothing. The record here builds itself out of the sales you were already making — who, how often, what they buy, when they stopped coming. It is not a list you sit down and type. It is the thing every market stall has been throwing away every Saturday for as long as there have been market stalls.
The peaches land and nobody hears about it.
Freestone season is three weeks and a post that reaches one person in twenty is not how you sell through it. People follow your stand and you send them one message when there is something worth coming for. That list is yours, it goes to a phone, and nothing sits between you deciding to send it and them reading it.
Your table is one of forty in a row.
A stall lives or dies on people walking past it, which means it competes with the weather, the parking, and whether anybody remembered the market was on. Here your stock sits in a market people browse and order from before they leave the house — so somebody can decide on your eggs on a Tuesday, and turn up on Saturday to collect them.
Four hundred pounds is a better day than forty, and one buyer rarely wants four hundred.
Open a lot and the trucks near you each take the share they want. The more they take between them the less it costs every one of them, and the total that reaches you is the same either way — a whole crop moved in one go instead of a table at a time. You separate the shares and each truck collects its own, which is what keeps it a sale from you to each of them. Packing is charged once per buyer, on its own line, so nobody is guessing what the produce actually cost.
None of your sales. Not a percentage of anything.
We do not take a cut of what you sell, at any volume, ever. Somebody ordering ahead from their phone pays a small flat convenience fee for the privilege of not queuing, and $1.00 of that comes back to you on every one of those orders. Anyone who would rather walk up to the table and pay you cash still can, and that costs nothing at all.
$49.00 a month, and the season is allowed to end.
Growing is seasonal and software usually is not, which is how a stand ends up paying through four quiet months for something it will not open until spring. Pause it when the beds are empty and start it again when they are not.
One price. Nothing above it, nothing gated behind a bigger plan, and no percentage of a single thing you sell.
Put this Saturday's list together before you cut it.
The stand you can look around is a real one running on this, with a real season of orders behind it. Nothing is a screenshot.