Teach Soap

I was a vendor at a small street fair and there were quite a lot of unattended children running wild through the place. I'm talking kids as young as 6 or 7 without even an older child minding them. Many were attracted to my table and for a while it was mayhem. Too many hands to count grabbing everything in sight and jamming the soap right up against their snotty little noses. (Thank God for shrink wrap.) I tried to be nice at first and asked them to please not touch. That lasted less than 60 seconds and they were right back at it again, so I finally had to run them off. Just in time for the next group to repeat the process. It was crazy! Has anyone else had this happen, and how do you handle it?

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Jennifer
Doing my best to blow up my kitchen. In style!

Yeesh! Haven't had to deal with this as of yet!

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Amber D that'd be me!

I feel your pain! Putting your table on bed risers might help because it makes the table higher and the smaller kids can't reach as easily. Unfortunately, there's no easy fix if the kids are unattended.

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Linda
I know the voices in my head aren't real, but they sure have some great ideas!

Good idea about the bed risers. Thanks! At least I had a spray bottle of alcohol and a roll of paper towels to clean up after the kids. And riddle me this: Why do grown people have to put their noses ON the soap to smell it? Lord have mercy!

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Jennifer
Doing my best to blow up my kitchen. In style!

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Linda
I know the voices in my head aren't real, but they sure have some great ideas!

Have you tried growling at them? Just kidding!
But in all seriousness, you could put your samples on a relatively high display case or one that can be closed but transparent.

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~Pamper yourself.

I haven't deal with such cases yet.

You could have saved your soap if the soup would have been on a height out of the reach of children. This incident reminds me of the day when me and my preschool going niece went to a fair, and many of the kids were behaving in a similar way to one the vendor. After a few minutes we that the vendor just switches his place to other.

I have my soaps on cardboard risers that I got from GershelBros.com; however, I have my "Sniffing Bar" of each soap out and encourage the sniffing. It produces sales. I even have a sign "Luscious Soaps Inside . . . Sniffs are free, Soaps cost $5 each".

I have never been able to figure out how to shrink wrap -- I always get holes in the shrink wrap, so kudos to those of you who can!

My child does "run around" but she is well-known to 90% of the Vendors who watch out for her. Most of the time she is with another "Market Kid". I have a mat under one of my tables for her to get away from the crowd. She has to check in within a certain amount of time or she's in time-out for triple the amount of time she missed. She knows to be polite and ask before touching any merchandise. She also is a Vendor and earns a bit from her wares (rubber band friendship bracelets and greeting cards).

The only issue I've had (besides the occasional theft by adults) is the 4 year old who took a bite into one of my soaps and I yelled to try to stop her because soap doesn't taste too good. The Mother did buy the bitten soap . . .

I had a mom and two girls (around 7-9 yrs old and wearing full makeup) stop at my booth a couple of weeks ago and almost destroy it. The girls handled everything and were even rearranging my display and stacking the soap into piles. The mom never said a word to them. I finally had to intervene. The older one looked at me and said, "Oops. My bad" and then laughed. The mom STILL didn't say anything to the girls, just continued smelling the soaps... SMH. If they come to my market again I won't allow the girls in the booth.

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Linda
I know the voices in my head aren't real, but they sure have some great ideas!