Robert Amston of Rip and Rotary is joining us today.
It's time for the annual holiday fruit sale and Good morning, sir Good morning, Robert.
So from what I understand you're already taking orders,
right?
you know in order to make sure the the website was working right I I had to open it yesterday Wednesday Thursday Tuesday Monday or Tuesday and Have my the first sale for the
Rippon Rotary holiday fruit sale was for me so I could see the credit card would work and so I'm the proud owner of some some oranges and
holiday gift sampler box.
So it's open and working right now.
Yesterday is the day that Rotary meets.
We meet at 12 o'clock on Wednesdays, most every week.
And right now, during the school year, we meet at the college.
The college is provided as a nice presentation room in the Commons to have our meetings.
And I kicked off the sale yesterday with them.
So the rotary members will have an order form and we're all ready to go to take orders.
So you'll be watching for your rotary members that you know because they'll probably ask you about buying some holiday fruit.
Okay, and what is the variety of fruit that is available for sale this year?
Well traditionally we've always had grapefruit from Texas and oranges from California and I don't know a couple years ago I said oh let's expand this a little bit and I added pears and it's you know I really love having the oranges and in the wintertime and these fresh oranges from California, but my wife and I really enjoy
So having the pears around is also terrific.
And then the fourth item we have is a holiday sampler box that has apples and pears and grapefruit, two different kinds of apples.
And they're great to have around.
Need a gift for somebody that you wouldn't buy anything for that person.
They're great to have and they're always appreciated and sometimes people who run smaller businesses will use these as a holiday gift for their for their employees, so That's the that's the range of our our products.
Okay,
except for one more thing.
Okay.
We have cases
that will mix of grapefruit and oranges.
We don't mix the pears with anything because they probably won't hold up, but we do have combo packs, I guess.
I
was going to say, they come in either full cases or quarter cases?
Right.
We have full cases, three quarter cases, half cases, and quarter cases, and it depends on the fruit.
how many items are in it.
With the oranges, I had a talk with our supplier about the oranges and so the oranges that we get, they're a little bigger and the skin is a little...
little thicker than some oranges and I think she and I talked about it for a while and they taste better so the count for the oranges is 72 and but you're getting you're getting a good quality product and also I want to want to remind everyone that the fruit is completely guaranteed the supplier guarantees it
to us and Rotary guarantees it to you.
If you have some bad fruit, even if it's two or three pieces, just call me and we'll make it right.
With the size of the shipment that we get, there's always some bad fruit in some of the boxes, but we go through all of them and pick out the ones that aren't any good.
And there's very few.
So.
Okay.
Well, Bob, tell us a little bit about some of the
different ways that the Rotary supports the community because the fruit sales supports the Rotary's causes right
and I think sometimes we're sort of unsung and in the things that we do we have
What the dollar amount is I I don't know But we supported that I can't remember right now, but we supported the boys and girls club, you know 30 40 thousand dollars There's a room in the boys and girls club.
That's actually
not exactly a broadcasting room, but a recording studio room that you can make podcasts in.
And that room is dedicated to Rotary because I think they, you know, use the funds and said, well, this can be your indication of what you've done for Boys and Girls Club.
And it's also an ongoing thing for us.
One of the programs that I particularly, well, these next two are particularly, I think,
effective programs, one of them is STRIVE.
And STRIVE is a program that addresses high school students that may be at risk of not graduating for a variety of reasons.
The program has changed over the years with the Boys and Girls Club coming here.
Some of the things that we used to do with STRIVE, the Boys and Girls Club is doing now, but we use some intervention in other ways to help them manage their high school life and move them toward graduation.
And then at graduation, Rotary will provide
scholarship money we call it scholarship money but if someone is graduating and let's say we this was a particular case that we had going into the trades he started working I think for a car dealership yes I think yeah a car dealership and we put some money
toward him buying a set of tools that he needed to start his life as a mechanic.
And so there's a variety of things that we do like that.
And so we call them scholarships.
And one more thing, we support the Dolly Parton Imagination Library to keep kids being provided with books and have them be reading at a young
age.
Think that's supplied with something like 400 million books to kids across the globe.
So
It's it's really remarkable and Dolly Parton was just a remarkable a remarkable person
Tell us about the ordering pickup and delivery because you got certain dates for that so right so
we started yesterday and you can order any time
between now and December 2nd.
So the sale really is kind of November.
I try to keep it from stretching out to two months.
So from the beginning of November to the beginning of December is when the sale has.
And because we order the fruit,
from Texas, California and Washington, it takes a while to get here because the order is not placed until I place the order and then the trucks start coming.
And so it's a couple weeks.
It's about two weeks.
There's a minimum of 10.
10 business days that I have to have between when the order is placed and when we have distribution day.
And this year, distribution day is Thursday, December 17th.
And we continue to be at Holman Ford and Chrysler.
and we're in the West Bay.
I have a couple of large rotary signs that I try to put up in the window, but if you go to the west side of the car
dealership, we'll be there.
Okay.
So how do people go about ordering then?
I see you got your phone number up there.
I didn't want to pass it along unless you wanted to.
No, I'd rather you're not broadcast it right now.
But if they contact a rotary club member and
I see you also have the ripandrotary.com website.
Can you order from that?
The way it works, I've set out some...
This year we have an e-mailing list because some people who've ordered online prefer to do it that way.
You can order online by going to the Rotary website and it's not hard to find, RIP and Rotary and it will take you there and for this sale the information about the sale is right at the top of the
of the website and then it'll take you to the order form and you can move through the order form and then pay for it with a credit card.
Today, the newspaper, if all things are right in the world, we'll have an ad and you can use the ad in
to order from.
There's a QR code on the ad or there's also a website address that you can go to.
So I guess that's three different ways.
Four, if you count going to a rotary member.
You can go to the rotary website.
You can look at the ad and use the QR code or use the web address.
Or you can mail us a check with the order form because the ad is actually an order form and you can mail that into me.
And I have, there's, there's a few people in Rippon enough that prefer to use the mail.
And for those folks, I also send them by surface mail and the ad.
So it's a easy exchange.
Did I answer your question?
It
seemed like a long answer.
You left no stone unturned.
So, well, Bob, thank you very much for joining us this morning and telling us about the Ripon Rotary holiday fruit sale.
My pleasure.
Thank you for having me here.