Little Free Failure of Capitalism - Restock: November 2024
Read this online at https://lffc.us/posts/restock-2024-11/.
Welcome to the Restock!
Updates and Changes
Art : we changed out the zine holders at the bottom of the right-hand cabinet for 48 tiny drawers to hold stickers and such. We’ll continue to do zines (and expand what we’re offering), but the cabinet needs a new layout, and we want to do more experimental stuff. It’s in progress. We’re also hoping to add the Short Story Printer this month! As always, want to add art to our rotating gallery? Check out our Call for Art (soon to be broadened to a call for stickers, small arts, and other fun things).
New items : we added toothbrushes, toothpaste, and warm gloves to the available items. Warm gloves were an experiment that turned out to be in more demand than we anticipated—we added them to the cabinet on November 7, and by November 30, all 96 pairs we had bought were gone. More are being shipped this week. Toothbrushes and toothpaste have also seen great uptake.
As it gets colder, it’s no shock that warmer socks are in high demand. We switched to a new sock vendor early in the month, with the effect being that our cost per pair of socks has dropped dramatically and the new socks are significantly warmer; an excellent win for everyone.
Overall usage : we’re hitting the point where the needs of the community exceed what one kiosk can provide. (This was always self-evident as a total thing, but more specifically we’re hitting the limits of what this LFFC location can distribute with its current stocking cadence and space available, both in the cabinet and for backstock.) To that end, we’ll be preparing what we’re (jokingly) calling a franchise pitch: a document sharing how we set up a LFFC, how we decided to stock it, and what all the costs are in doing so. The hope is that we can provide one example of what it actually takes to run such a thing, and thus increase the number of people who feel able to do something like this.
Monthly Usage
This month, we distributed:
- 228 pairs of thermal socks
- 96 pairs of thermal gloves
- 580 Band-Aids
- 31 CoBan rolls
- 34 gauze pads
- 303 nitrile gloves
- 78 masks (N95 and KF94)
- 12 tubes of sunscreen (still useful in the winter!)
- 89 doses of ibuprofen
- 35 pairs of earplugs
- 200 pairs of handwarmers
- 37 ponchos
- 26 pencils
- 36 bars of soap
- 64 toothbrushes
- 43 tubes of toothpaste
- 63 tampons
- 45 menstrual pads (across all sizes)
- 194 condoms, and 109 lubricant packets
- 11 soil lead tests, and two ten-packs of object lead tests
- 28 boxes (56 doses) of naloxone
Our COGGA for this month is $803.46, not including naloxone, condoms, lubricants, or lead tests (all of which are provided by outside groups at no cost to us).
We received two donations this month from Harley LaRoux and Bill O’Connor. Thank you so much for your generosity!
Conclusion
That’s it for this month’s Restock! If there’s more information you’d like to know, please feel free to use our Suggestions Form or email us at info@lffc.us .