We do the refills out of love, the passion and Jenny’s enthusiasm for it.
We sacrifice total monthly income by Tom restricting his wall and floor tiling work to be able to donate time to the refills, which is usually no problem at all. However the cost of living increases are making this less viable as time goes by. March so far has also been a really quiet month for us. We have been operating at a loss for the first time ever and we could not afford to re stock this week, also for the first time!
Obviously it has been cold, snowy and windy recently which will have put people off coming out to visit our mobile shop, however delivery orders have not yet taken up the slack, we hope this is just a temporary blip.
To ensure we can pay our household bills, we are probably going to have to make changes to allow me more time to earn money tiling. This will probably be at first be in the form of combining events / pop up locations on to be the same day each month, for example Purley on Thames in the morning and Burghfield Common in the afternoon, rather than the current arrangements of visits on separate days. We may even have to scale back on the places we go to, because many are not always viable, for example our last visit to The Watermill Theatre, we took £8 in takings for the whole event!
Don’t worry, we wont stop refilling and Jenny will remain open at home, however we may eventually have to scale back on the days we put into going out and about with our mobile shop, we may even change our deliveries to every other week and not weekly simply to give Tom more time to earn more money.
However, we are not at that point yet and the only way to ensure the current service continues is to get more customers refilling, please spread the word, get friends and neighbours to give us a try.
We will make changes from May and only if we have to. We will give plenty of notice too but WE NEED YOU please support us if you can.
We do not want to start banging nails into any part of the Thatcham Refillable coffin unless we have no choice!
Thanks
Tom – Thatcham Refillable
Susan Whitaker
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