By the end of the next week, the outside of the new building was up: walls, floors, roof, and insulation.
It looked great. It looked like it was almost finished. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. It still needed plumbing, electrical work, and a lot of inside construction.
“I’d say we have another two weeks of work,” Sowbug said. “At least.”
“Yeah,” Dandelion said. “A lot of plastering and mudding. I know you two know the drill,” indicating Earthworm and Sorrel. “How much finishing have either of you done?”
“Quite a bit, actually,” said Lois. “We’ve completed a bunch of houses at this point.”
“Enough to know this isn’t quite the halfway mark,” Mo said.
“As long as you know,” Sowbug said. “Having said that, I think we’re doing really well.”
“I think we’re a pretty good team,” Sorrel said.
“Absolutely,” said Dandelion. “A lot better than the last crew we had.”
“Not hard workers?” asked Mo.
“No, they were very hard workers,” said Sowbug. “The problem was they were hard on everybody.”
“We should clean up and get ready for dinner,” Dandelion said.
Neither Dandelion or Sowbug had talked much about Don and Dick. They decided they’d rather forget all that and concentrate on the good work that was happening now. Nevertheless, the new crew quickly figured out there was something wrong with their predecessors.
As the team headed toward the main house, they noticed a truck pulled up by it with a lot of boxes coming from it. Each of them quickly realized that it wasn’t construction materials since all the boxes were fairly small, all of them were the same size, and all of them seemed rather heavy from the reactions of those carrying them. The quick consensus was that they either contained bricks or books.
And in this case, they contained books. Cookbooks.
*
“Look at it!” Nancy said to Marge, waving one of cookbooks at her. “These look great!”
Marge was flipping through another copy. “They do look good.”
“The first edition looked good,” Nancy said. “I think this edition looks even better.”
“Well, we’ve got thirty boxes,” Marge said. “And the book is so much bigger. I hope it sells well.”
“I’m sure it will,” said Nancy.
Cat came by, took one look at the books and the boxes, and picked one up to flip through. “Hey, this looks really good. I’ll bet we sell a lot of these.”
Nancy looked at Marge. “What did I say?”
The next morning, Nancy, Dan, and Sal lugged ten of the boxes to the produce stand and ten of the boxes to the bread and pastry stand. Nancy carefully set up displays of the books in each of the stands.
She also called the Statewide Bookstore and convinced them to come and buy five boxes.
“It wasn’t hard,” she said to Dan. “Considering that they’ve already sold four boxes. This is now an established product and this new edition is so much better.”
“Well,” said Dan. “Let’s see how it does.”
By the end of the day, it was apparent it was going to sell well. Customers were excited to see the new edition and even more excited by all the new stuff inside.
“Wow,” one woman said. “This is like a whole new book. You’re old book has been my go to cookbook for the last six months but I think it’s going to be replaced.”
By the end of the week, each of the stands had sold almost two boxes, or nearly four boxes total.
“Not too bad,” Dan said to Luna. “Of course this was the first week. I imagine things will slow up from here.”
“I doubt it,” Luna said. “It’s the holiday season. This is when everybody cooks. The books should sell like crazy until the new year.”
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