Handing off the concession stand

The concession chair’s job turns over roughly every year, usually because a child graduates. That means the person doing it is at their most useful in month ten and gone by month twelve, and the next one starts from close to nothing.

What normally gets handed over is a box. Some receipts, a key, a supplier’s business card, and a cheerful assurance that it is not that complicated. Everything that made this year work better than last year is in the outgoing chair’s head, and it goes with them.

Here is what to write down, in the order of what it costs to lose.

1. What a serving is

This is first and almost nobody puts it first.

For every item you make rather than buy, write down how much goes in. Ounces of cheese on an order of nachos. Scoops. How many pumps. How many ketchup packets you hand out with fries, honestly, rather than how many you meant to.

It goes first because it is the only thing on this list that is genuinely unrecoverable. A supplier can be found again. A price can be looked up. But the portion your stand settled on — after two years of the scoop being slightly too big and the cheese running out in the third quarter — exists nowhere except in the hands of whoever was serving. Lose it and the next chair re-learns it by running out of things.

It is also the number every other number depends on. What an order costs you, how many cases to buy, whether an item is worth having on the board at all — all of it is downstream of how much goes in a tray.

2. What you actually sold, game by game

Not what you ordered. What sold.

If you have it, it is the most useful thing you own, because it turns next year’s ordering from a guess into arithmetic. If you do not have it, start now — even two games is enough to be worth more than any general advice, including this article’s.

Write the attendance beside it if you can get it. Sales without a crowd size is a number that only describes one night; sales per head is a rate that describes every night.

3. The list, with cases on it

Every item, what you pay for a case, and how many are in the case. That last column is the one people skip, and it is what makes the price mean anything.

A shared spreadsheet beats a binder for the obvious reason that it survives a house move, and beats a folder of photographed invoices because somebody can sort it.

4. The boring institutional things

Keys, codes, the alarm, which door sticks. The health inspector’s name and what they asked about last time. Whether the freezer at the back is yours or the booster club’s. Who to call when the soda machine stops. The supplier account number and — this matters more than it sounds — the name of the actual person at the supplier who answers the phone.

None of this is hard to write. It is all hard to find out again.

5. What did not work

The part everybody omits, and the cheapest thing on the list to write.

The item that sat there all season. The night you ordered for a crowd that did not come. The supplier who was late twice. The layout of the window that made the queue jam. Nobody writes down their misses, so every chair repeats the previous chair’s, and the stand never accumulates anything.

Three lines is enough. “We tried pretzels, they did not sell, do not order them again” is worth more to your successor than any amount of encouragement.

If your club keeps its stand in FunnelCake, most of this list is already written down. Your portions are in your recipes, the season report holds what sold game by game and what each case cost, and the handoff notes have a heading each for the keys and the building, the suppliers, and what did not work. What it cannot do for you is the next section.

Do it in October, not June

The single biggest improvement you can make to a handover is when you do it.

In June there is nothing to point at. The stand is closed, the season is a memory, and the conversation is abstract in a way that makes it useless — you will forget half of what you meant to say, and the incoming chair has no idea which half mattered.

In October there is a game on Friday. Bring them. Let them stand at the window for an hour, watch the queue, see what runs out. Then the handover is not a document, it is a series of “this is what I meant” moments attached to things they have now seen. Write the document too, but write it after that, when you both know what is actually worth writing.

The stand that improves year on year is the one where each chair leaves more behind than they were given. That is almost entirely a matter of writing five things down while you still remember them.