The Food Storage Blog

I wanted to pass along some quick updates though its a busy, busy day today!

First, we’ve received our first shipment of new bags; I will update Discount Mylar Bags to have them available on Monday.  We did a small run of an awesome 4-layer 5mil 10″x16″ (A little larger than our current 1-gallon bag).  While we love our standard 3.5mil 1-gallon bag, we usually recommend them as an inexpensive way to extend the shelf-life of your food storage by a couple of years.  The 5mil bags are recommended for the ultra-long term storage (10 years+) many folks are looking for.  I already shipped out several pre-orders on these bags, and they are gorgeous!  They are a bit more expensive, but they are more than worth it.

We are also back in stock on our 8.5″x8.75″ Zip Seal Bags.  You can buy them at the old store at Advice and Beans Store today, and I’ll also put these up in the new store on Monday.  I have to say I was surprised by the quantities we sell of this item, as many people use them in their everyday cooking to store pantry items like flour, sugar or baking chocolate ; the Advicewife made me stock these, so I have to give kudos to her!  They are also great if you want to build your own ‘SmartPails’; that is a 5-gallon bucket that contains a number of items that would allow you to make a complete meal from a single bucket.  For example, a SmartPail might contain 1 gallon each of rice, macaroni, and wheatberries, with smaller packs of salt, pepper, garlic, yeast, cream of tartar, baking powder and other items that suit your families tastes.

We’ve also restocked on a full line of AdviceLok Bag Clips.  The largest ones are the perfect size to reseal open oxygen absorbers to keep them fresh.  The smaller ones can be used to seal any number of different types of plastic bags.  They are a patented item, and the best bag clips available on the market.

Tomorrow, we’re excited to be setting up at Bill Goodman’s Gun and Knife Show at the TN State Fairgrounds in Nashville tomorrow.  Everyone is welcome to stop by!  We’ll be offering a great selection of Mylar Bags, Oxygen Absorbers, buckets and other good stuff, but without any shipping costs!  We’re also picking up the sales tax, so what you see is what you get!

Finally, I’ve been working on a longer article about the ‘enemies of long-term food storage’ that should post Tuesday, I hope you’ll come by and read it!

As always, thanks to all our friends and customers; we wouldn’t be here without you!

We are very happy to announce that we have a new online storefront!  The current one will still work, at least for the foreseeable future, however it just isn’t meeting our needs.  It has a clunky checkout mechanism, was limited to PayPal Checkout which some people didn’t like, and in general was pretty slow.  Our new storefront is available at Discount Mylar Bags.  It has a lot of benefits over our current storefront, including:

• It’s much, much faster
• We are able to offer bulk quantity discounts on almost every item (drill down to the item details to see the discounts and quantities for each item!)
• You can use either Google Checkout or PayPal Checkout now; we received our first orders today and both systems seem to be working
• The checkout itself is much less painful to use=)
• We are allowed 5 times as many items as our current shopping cart software, which means you will have access to all of our inventory, instead of bits and pieces because of Godaddy’s 20-item limit (yes, I could have upgraded that with GoDaddy, but with all the other problems with their software, it just never made sense to pay triple to do so)
• The back end maintenance, order processing systems, and general ease of use seem to be much better, which will allow me to update the store more timely as necessary.
• Product reviews area are available, plus I will be able to add informational videos about each item, which I hope to start doing soon!

I hope all that means a better experience for our customers.  In honor of the grand opening, we are offering a 15% off coupon for those of us who shop early while their still might be some hiccups with the new system.  The Coupon Code is ‘Test15’.  I’ll be offering a special 1-use 25% coupon to the first 25 customers who shop the store and provide feedback about the new site at admin@adviceandbeans.com:  what they like, what they don’t, any errors encountered, etc.

In order to accommodate the different items we are now offering, I was unable to do a blanket free shipping model (because now you can order 1 Mylar Bag if you want and aren’t limited to certain quantities).  So what we are doing is offering free shipping on all orders over $50.  However, we’ll also be doing free shipping on the combo-packs of Mylar Bags and Oxygen Absorbers we have available at the Original Store, so nothing should change for most customers and you will still get free shipping on any of the quantities we offered before.

For those interested, the store is powered by Big Commerce.  I’m not sold that it is the best e-commerce solution, but for now it should help us expand our offerings and provide better service to our customers.

I hope you’ll come by and see us!  Again, our new store is open at Discount Mylar Bags.

To give folks a chance to particpate we’re going to run a little contest over the next couple of months!  I’ll be including a flier with all new orders letting people know as well as providing up-to-date information about goings on at the store and blog.

Here’s how it will work.  In 300-500 words (about 1 double-spaced page in Word or Wordpad), answer the question ‘If you could offer 1 piece of advice about food storage, what would it be?’  Alternately, describe a situation where your food storage came in useful in a real emergency scenario.  Feel free to include pictures of your food storage pantry or video as well!

I’ll post the articles as often as I get them, and at the end of 90 days, 3 entries will win a combination of $500 at the store ($250, $150 and $100)!  I’ll also toss in some goodies I have lying around, including a spool of paracord, an awesome bug-out backpack from Rothco and some other great stuff!  And everyone who enters will get at least a cool coupon.

The fine print:  All entries must be new content and become the property of Advice and Beans, though of course you’ll be more than welcome to cross-post on your own personal blog if you have one.    We reserve the right to edit out any personal information and correct minor spelling mistakes.  Send your entries to admin@adviceandbeans.com and if you have any questions please let me know!

Good luck everyone!

All my stock orders came in at the same time this month, so in the next 4 days we’ll be receiving shipments of all our sizes of oxygen absorbers:  100cc, 300cc (yay!!!), 2000cc, as well as the larger Mylar bags.  It’s seemed like forever since we had 300cc’s in stock, but in reality its only been about a month.  Since January, we’ve doubled our order sizes (and frequency) yet again and we’re again doing an ok job of managing our inventory; I’m not really a doom-and-gloomer, but people are worried and its showing in our volumes.  And that’s all kinds of people; we get a ton of orders from places as remote as Alaska, Puerto Rico, and just recently, a rash of orders from New York City.  White color, blue color, working poor and upper middle class.  I’m definitely a believer in the ‘wisdom of the masses’, so my wife and I, as mentioned in our previous post, are putting some more resources into getting our house in order.

For the totally bored, we’ve hired a new local logistics company to handle our warehousing.  As we first started to grow our business, I ‘luckily’ had a business friend I had worked with for years at my previous job who let me use his warehousing facilities to handle our first pallet-sized shipments.  The reason is that it costs on average $150 to get a lift-gate truck to drop off pallets in places without a dock.  I had a couple dropped off at our home office that way early on, and it was incredibly cost-prohibitive.  As the business has grown to stand on its own, I felt it was time to move out and stop taking advantage of the relationship.  My friend is happy we are successful, and though I’ve offered to pay for the services given on multiple occasions, he has consistently refused.  So now, I’ll take him out to lunch and we’ll talk about old times and new business opportunities.

This leads me to a post I always planned to do on Advice and Beans, but which I never got to:  the power of your word and the magic of networking.  At my former job, there are dozens of buyers that beat down their vendors and suppliers regularly, and who focus on nothing but price.  What they don’t realize is that focusing on price only negates the power of relationship-building.  For many years, I managed a half-dozen suppliers where our company and theirs were joined at the hip, and real partnerships.  Sure, I wanted a good price on the services I purchased (print, office supplies and fulfillment services mostly), but I also wanted our partners to be successful and make a decent profit, for a lot of reasons.  For one, partners that don’t think you are taking advantage of them will go out of their way to help you out of tough spots, will provide what you need on-time and usually faster than they will other companies that don’t treat them with a high level of respect.

What does this have to do with anything?  Well, treating this one supplier with respect led him to, with no prompting, offer his services for the small business I was starting up.  And his services gave me the ability to cash-flow my way to much larger orders, and in turn, more business.  So the actions I took over the course of many years led to a result no one could have predicted.  This tells me that the golden rule works: treat folks like you want be treated.  Sure, not every relationship is going to lead to a ‘payoff’, but that should never be the intent anyway.  But if you treat every relationship you have like it is precious, likely when you need something, someone will be there to help.  If instead you beat up the folks who handle your furnace, your car, your insurance…are they really going to go out of their way to help you when you are really in a bind?  If instead you are long on patience, pay your bill quickly, and forgive mistakes, you will often have people who will put you at the top of their list in the event of a real emergency.

If the last year has taught me anything, it is that hard work, belief in a higher power, the willingness to take a risk and an overwhelming desire to treat people right are often the only things one needs to get ‘lucky breaks’.  The next time you find yourself complaining that someone else got some benefit because ‘they were in the right place at the right time’ or ‘got lucky’, or any other such statement, should realize that they likely received the benefit due to their actions over a long period of time.