The Swanky Swine

The cold and flu season has been brutal this year and for the last two weeks it seems like at least one person was out every day.  Finally, this past Friday, everyone was feeling better and back to school, so we took the opportunity to finally take a group picture.   These 10 students have worked really hard this year learning brand new concepts and skills. Their hard work has made the Swanky Swine a great success.

One of our favorite things is getting to interact with all of the school’s students when they shop at the store.  While it wasn’t our primary goal, The Swanky Swine has given all of Woodlawn’s students the chance to practice their money math skills.  The employees often help the elementary students to figure out how much money they have to spend and what they can buy.  Our customers love the independence of picking out and paying for their own purchases.

The store is very popular with the students. They are constantly asking when we will be open or if we have any new items this week. Parents have even told us that their children will wake up in the morning and say “It’s Swanky Swine day!!”  The employees are really proud of our popularity and are excited to serve their fellow students.

This was our Wednesday crew before the shift started.  We had so many new items it was hard to fit them all on the cart! This week was one of the busiest in our short history but the employees handled it well.  They are starting to get more comfortable working and have really improved at serving our loyal customers.

Every month we pick an employee of the month.  The employee of the month is someone who works hard and meets or exceeds our employee expectations. These expectations include:

• following directions
• having a positive attitude
• practicing good customer service including making eye contact & smiling
• wearing a uniform when scheduled to work
• washing their hands before working and practicing proper food handling
• increasing knowledge of prices & products
• Making an effort to learn money math skills including adding purchases, making change and using a calculator

This month, Mike Towers, was our employee of the month.

Mike works really hard at the Swanky Swine. He has never missed a shift. He likes to be the cashier the most. He practices his money math skills all the time and is a great cashier!

Mike said, “What I like about the Swanky Swine is that the customers are so nice to me.  Also, without any help, I’m good at subtracting to find the change. I always smile at the customers when they walk in to the store. I learned how much everything costs and how much all the coins are worth.  I know how much one, two, three and four quarters are too.”

Great job Mike! We are really proud of you and your hard work!

Today was Valentine’s day and after two days of planning and baking we were ready to deliver our cookies.

This is only half of the cookies we made! We couldn’t even fit them all on the table.

As soon as we were ready to deliver the cookies it started to rain! We tried to go to the middle school building without getting too wet!

The kids were all excited to get their cookies grams. They loved that the cookies were in the shape of pigs and everyone thought they were delicious.   We received a ton of compliments. On the way back to our classroom, the employees kept saying, “I can’t believe they like our cookies! Everyone was so happy!”  They were all so proud that something they made brought joy to so many people.  The employees did everything from planning and budgeting to baking and packaging.  We were proud of them too.

Our delivery team was most excited when they were finally out of cookies and could go back and enjoy the day themselves.  I had to talk Mary out of keeping the pig ears on though!

Several students brought treats for the class and they really enjoyed celebrating.  They finished the day with music class which is one of their favorites.  It was a successful and profitable first Valentine’s Day at the Swanky Swine!

This week we are selling cookie grams for Valentines day.  For $1, students at the school could purchase a cookie gram from the Swanky Swine and we will deliver it to classes on Thursday.  We sold over 200 cookie grams! We couldn’t believe how popular our cookies were. It was exciting but we knew there was a lot of work to do.  On Monday and Tuesday, between tests and classes, we baked 33 dozen cookies.  It was quite a job!

The employees mixed the dough, rolled it out and cut out heart and pig shapes (of course!).  They iced and decorated all of the cookies by hand.  It was our first big job but we all learned a lot.

Everyone chipped in and did their part and we finally finished packaging all of the cookies this afternoon. We baked our hearts out (pun intended) and We can’t wait to deliver our “hogs & kisses” to the students tomorrow. We hope everyone enjoys them!