committee business

Writing my report on the financial aspects of the recent show took longer than I was expecting. There is a world of difference between preparing detailed financial information that lets you calculate that you owe thirty pounds to this person and one hundred and six to that, and management information that lets you see how you did overall and how it compares to last year.  Particularly when last year is in a different Excel file to this year, and you are writing the report in Word.  I began to yearn for the luxury of a split screen, like I used to have in the office, and to wish I knew how to remove a copied spreadsheet excerpt from a Word document when I discovered it needed updating it after inserting it.

As it was I ended up copying and pasting the text I wanted to keep to a new document and carrying on from there.  Twice.  There has to be a better way of doing it, and if I were running a business I'd find out what it was.  As it is I bodge along.  Now that people who sold honey and cakes have got their cheques I'll see whether I get any squeaks of protest over the next couple of days from anyone who thinks they've been underpaid.

Following my analysis of honey sales for 2014 and 2015 I have some provisional data about the price elasticity of honey.  Last year we tried raising the price by a pound to six pounds a jar.  Six pounds seemed to me jolly reasonable given the work that went into producing a jar of honey, the cost of the jar and the expense of looking after the bees, not to mention how much the other stalls were charging for very modest helpings of ice cream, and while I was doing my stint on the stand nobody said to me that the price was too high.  But other members assured us that the public had complained, and having come in to the tent to buy honey had left empty handed, saying it was too expensive and that they could get it more cheaply from their local beekeeper.  So this year we experimentally took the price back down to five pounds.  I can now report that our 17 per cent price drop produced a 26 per cent uplift in the number of one pound jars sold, from 91 to 115.

Except that there are too many variables.  We didn't change the price for rolling your own candle or colouring in a wooden bee, and sales of those went up as well.  So did sales of honey flavoured fruit squash, but those are heavily dependent on weather and how much squash you decide to mix up.  So we still don't really know much about the relationship between price and demand for honey, other than that beekeepers who can be bothered to package it in quantities of less than a pound do well.  As one of my fellow committee members observed, if you regularly eat honey you probably buy it by the pound because the unit cost is lower, but if you just want a jar to take home from the show for grandma you might opt to spend four pounds instead of five.

The committee didn't eat much cake, though.  Maybe it's too hot for cake.  I was rather horrified that one of the first people to arrive hadn't had anything to eat all day, and asked if she wouldn't like an omelette or some cheese, but she said that cake would be fine.