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Tips for Saving Your Sanity or How to Get Your Christmas Shopping Done
Christmas doesn’t really have to be made insane by all of the shopping. Here are some tips on helping you keep your cool.
Buy Online
Do we really need to do this one? Shop online when you can. Yes, it is sooooo much easier and if you’re lucky, your gift recipient has a wish list somewhere online. (Like Amazon!) No, it won’t take forever to ship it. If you look at some sites, you’ll discover you can order up to a couple of days before Christmas. (Although, your problem might involve the fact that you might need that service.)
There really isn’t much of anything that you can’t find online and you can get it with just a click or two!
Buy Local
We were over in Spring Place Pottery in Cartersville just last week and there was not a crush of shoppers in any of their wonderful downtown shops. I had the opportunity to meet a very nice potter (Hi, Jim, loved talking to you!) and get the scoop on some of his wonderful wares. I also got to talk with owner Gail Freeman, who is just the sweetest person. Best of all, we got to support a wonderful small, local shop!
How many ways can we say “buy local”? Of course, the best thing about smaller, local stores this time of year is that there just aren’t as many people there. That means that you have the added benefit of better, more personal customer service and no emptied shelves either. The second thing is that you can find some really interesting possibilities that you are going to miss in those big box stores. Go to your downtown and see what’s there. You may find something for your Christmas Shopping Headache that’s better than the biggest bottle of Tylenol!
Buy Gift Certificates
When we were kids, our grandparents gave us two very different kinds of Christmas presents. Our grandmother –Mammy we called her- always gave us something sweet like pajamas or clothes or books. Our grandfather –Papa Kirk- gave us money. He would put it in an envelope, put a Christmas sticker on it, write your name on yours, punch a hole in the envelope and actually tie it on the Christmas tree.
Mammy was always horrified. “Benny!” she would say to him as he was hanging them up. “That is NOT a Christmas present. There’s just no thought behind it at all!”
Of course, while she’s saying that, we’re all thinking ‘hooray, there’s an envelope on the Christmas tree with my name on it and money in it!’
Gift certificates are kind of the same thing. People really love them. You can get them in some really cool places, too. Wildcat on a Wing up in Ball Ground, for example –is a wonderful craft shop with leather purses and handmade candles, jewelry, hand crafted furniture, and a whole host of great items. (Julie and David Boone have the coolest stuff and Boone’s (that’s David) birdhouses would top the list.
Even restaurants do gift certificates nowadays, which is pretty cool if the person on your list has a favorite one. (And restaurants don’t open at 9 am and close at 5 pm, either.) The best part of buying a gift certificate, though, is that you can usually just order it. No trip to the mall, just call them…or visit them online. Our niece loves ones from Chico’s, her husband loves ones from Brooks Brothers. No worry about the price, either, you just choose the amount. If your gift recipient likes a certain store’s merchandise -order a gift certificate from them. They’ll just send it to you in the mail. No trip to the mall, see?
Of course, some people might say there’s no thought behind it at all, but the recipient is probably thinking: “Hooray, there’s a envelope under the tree with my name on it and maybe there’s a gift certificate in it!”
Shop Off Hours
OK, so the grandkid wants something and the only place to find it is WalMart. You have our sympathies, but you can make that trip less insane if you go shopping after midnight. Yes, there really are less people there than there are during the day, even at Christmas. If you can find what you need in a store that is open 24 hours, this time of year those off hours are the only way to fly.
Buy extra
Now this might sound nuts, but it can save your sanity for real. Buy something extra that will be useful as a generic sort of gift. Gloves, a scarf, a pretty one of those blank journals, a set of bath stuff. When you see something like that, buy it and keep it put away for when you realize that its December 23rd and you forgot to buy Aunt Agnes something.
Start Next Month….
Those are my best suggestions for right now, but I’ll let you in on my secret. All during the year I buy stuff for presents. I remember buying a Christmas present for one of our great-nieces on January 5th! I just do it all year long. Last month, I simply pulled down the three big plastic bins full of stuff and voila! I am nearly done.
Next time…buy early. Even better, buy all year long. Then you can have some eggnog while everybody else gets pepper-sprayed on Black Friday…….
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Northside Hospital-Cherokee Auxiliary Celebrates 50 Years!
Back in October of 1961, before a hospital was even built in Cherokee County, seven members of the community gathered together to write the bylaws of the first organized Auxiliary of R.T. Jones Memorial Hospital in Canton. This year the Auxiliary, now know as the Northside Hospital-Cherokee Auxiliary, celebrates its 50th anniversary.
Prior to the first admission of patients to the hospital in April of 1962, the thirty charter members of the Auxiliary- under the direction of the supervisor of nurses- made patient beds, patient requisitions and performed many other duties as requested.
Today, the Northside Hospital-Cherokee Auxiliary assists the hospital with a tremendous amount of volunteer hours and financial assistance. Annually, the group’s seventy active members volunteer more than 15,000 hours of service, adding a special caring touch as they interact with patients and families throughout the hospital.
In addition to service hours, the Auxiliary operates a Gift Shop with promotions held four times a year for employees. Profits from the Gift Shop and these promotions are used to fund hospital-sponsored events and other departmental request throughout the year. In 2010 the Auxiliary contributed more than $7,700 to Northside Hospital-Cherokee.
The Auxiliary also funds the Northside Hospital-Cherokee Auxiliary Scholarship which assists current Auxilians, hospital employees and their immediate families who are pursuing health-related programs as students in accredited colleges, universities or health-related schools. In 2010, more than $3,400 was awarded in scholarships.
Congratulations to the Northside Hospital-Cherokee Auxiliary on their many successes for Cherokee County and on their golden anniversary!
For more information on the Auxiliary, or to volunteer, call 770-720-5282 or visit http://www.northside.com and click on the “Volunteer” link.
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The More Things Stay the Same
Welcome to the
North Georgia Business Blog!Our newest blog is here, featuring information for and about business, interviews with business owners, and reviews of some of the best businesses in North Georgia
The More Things Stay the Same:
Or Don’t Be Intimidated by Social Media
By Katherine CookI haven’t been playing around with social media all that long (I can honestly say I was really intimidated at first, but now I love it!). At first it seems overwhelming, maybe even a little scary, but, like a roller coaster, you need to just jump in and hang on!
I began by reading about social media; much of what I read suggested that with social media, the relationship between buyer and seller had changed. ‘Everything is different now!’ much that I read said. ‘Social Media is completely different!’
But the more I became exposed to the world of social media, the more I realized that the same sort of business and sales rules apply in it as do in the non-digital one. For example, lots of social media ‘gurus’ talk about the importance of social influence marketing online, have even written books about it, but of course, it is crucially important in the non-digital sphere (particularly in big ticket items, where purchase is a more serious-read expensive- investment). Of course, what retail store owner hasn’t experienced social influence right before their eyes?
In terms of social influence, it does seem that influencer-contacts can be added quicker and in greater numbers, though; that means social media can improve your sphere of social influence- assuming your particular influencers are online to talk to, of course.
While some of digital’s fine young cannibals talk about how everything in social media is about “customer relationships”, virtually anyone who has been in sales or business recognizes that it’s that same “customer relationship” they have been working on their entire careers. The concept hasn’t changed, just the method of communication. Nothing really scary there, see?
Many of the same rules apply in digital, like the famous “Four C’s” of capture, connect, communicate and close, just repeated in a slightly different way. You still capture the prospect’s/customer’s attention, connect with them, and communicate with them although a lot of the closing is done offline, I suspect. One good thing about social media is that the number of prospects you can capture, connect and communicate with can be expanded more easily in the digital world (and what salesperson doesn’t want more prospects in that funnel?).
Communication is vital in the world of business/sales, and social media is great for that. It really isn’t anything so different; you just need to learn that new method of communicating with your prospect. If you are a pro in sales, you’ve been communicating constantly with your prospects your entire career. You just need to adapt a bit. (And I believe that professional salespeople are some of the most naturally adaptable people around.)
Small business owners may be of a little less “adaptable” mindset, but they tend to see the handwriting on the wall and adapt when necessary. After all, that’s really the only way you stay in business, right?
A couple of small differences…if you are looking for a niche market, social media is great for that, since, once again, your possibilities are so much bigger and ‘work’ quicker. You needn’t worry that your prospective customers will be hard to find. Talk a little about what you are looking for and they’ll find you! That’s probably the coolest thing about social media!
Social Media should not be about hard selling; but most salespeople would say that prospects in the non-digital world are turned off by that, too.
I have heard people complain that qualification might be a little more difficult in social media, and that may well be true, but that seems a fair trade for the sheer volume of real possibilities you may find.
One paradigm seems to be changing; the world of social media was initially made up predominantly of the fairly young (teens and 20’s, mostly). Now the social media world is growing older. No, I don’t mean that the younger market is aging. I mean that more people of every age group are learning about and using social media. (The fastest growing group on Facebook is women over fifty!)
Last of all, I do not believe that social media will mark the death of traditional forms of media as many “gurus” claim. Social media moves very fast, too fast I think to fully brand online. One of the greatest complaints that marketers are making currently is the lack of ROI in many of the social media sites’ advertising. This is, I suspect, due predominantly to the sheer volume of participants and the speed at which social media moves. With limited ROI, however, very few marketers are going to invest their client’s money.
One thing social media can do very well, though, is drive website traffic. That means that using social media should make you think hard about adding ads to your site. We have.
All-in-all, social media can be a wonderful business tool to assist you in improving your bottom line. Of course, that’s exactly what email did, and the telephone, and probably everything else back to the discovery of the wheel.
We have a new tool to add to our marketing-sales-advertising toolbox. Nothing scary here….and nothing really all that different.
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