I just took over the concession stand

Most people take over a stand the same way: somebody who has done it for four years moves on, and you inherit a chest freezer, a cash box and a folder nobody has opened since two chairs ago. The first instinct is to reorganise everything. Resist it for two weeks. Almost everything in that building is there because it works, and you cannot tell which parts those are until you have stood behind the window for one event.

What you cannot postpone is finding out what the stand is already committed to. Orders have lead times, the school has rules about money, and somebody is expecting you at a meeting you have not been told about.

Week one: find out what you have agreed to

None of this takes long. All of it is hard to recover from if you find it out late.

• Which events you are committed to — the athletic director. The schedule sets every order date behind it, and “we usually do the home games” turns out to include a tournament, a band competition and whatever the middle school borrows the stand for.
• Where the money goes after the event — the booster treasurer. Schools have rules about this and they are not optional.
• Who can open the building — the head custodian. A locked kitchen at four o’clock ends the night before it starts.
• What is already on order — last year’s chair. Two people ordering buns is the classic first mistake.
• Which supplier accounts exist — the treasurer again. A new account can take a week to open, which is longer than you have.

Ask for the schedule in writing. Each of those events sells differently enough that you cannot plan them as one thing, and you want to know that now rather than the week before the first one.

If last year’s chair kept the stand in FunnelCake, ask them to invite you as their successor. You take over the account, they stay on to answer questions, and the season report they leave you already holds what sold, what was ordered, and their notes on keys, suppliers and what did not work.

Week two: count what is actually in the building

Count everything once, properly, before you order anything. Not an inventory system, not a spreadsheet with formulas — a list of what is on the shelf and how much of it there is. Count in whatever unit you would say out loud: six cases of water, four loose bottles, two half-used bags of chips.

The number that trips everyone up is servings. A case is not a number of servings until you do a division, and the division is different for every product. Nobody writes that number on an invoice, and it is the number every order you place from here depends on. Take three things a stand buys and work it through — the figures below are how a case is described, not a claim about what any particular supplier sells you:

What you buy	How the case is described	Servings per case makes
Hot dog buns	12 packs of 8	96
Nacho cheese	6 cans of 104 oz, 2.5 oz on an order	249
Fountain syrup	1 box, 5 gallons, 12 oz per cup	53

Two of those three do not divide into anything else on the menu cleanly. Buns come 96 to a case and franks often come 24 to a pack, so ordering one of each in round numbers leaves you with buns; that is why so many stands end a season with bread in the freezer.

What to leave alone

Two things, both tempting and both better left until you have run an event.

The first is prices. You will find something priced oddly and want to fix it. Wait: a price that looks wrong on paper is often the one thing a regular crowd notices, and you will learn more from one night at the window than from an afternoon with the price list.

The second is the menu. Everything on the board is there because it sold, or because somebody insisted, and you cannot tell which from the outside. Run one event, watch what goes and what comes back, and then change one thing.