PGP Shopping Guide

Hi folks,

I spent yesterday sprucing up the website a bit for the holidays—sweeping out a few typos and bad links, adding in a holiday section. I put together a holiday card to go out with gift orders. I jerry-rigged a gift certificate option (since our commerce provider doesn’t have one) to work with coupons codes.

Quite the web-master, I am, I must say, at least for someone who is temperamentally unfit for webmastering.

And speaking of temperament… I’m pretty sure I’m unfit to be director of marketing and sales in this season of Black Friday emails. Ugh! I can hardly stand it. When I go through my inbox first thing in the morning, I feel like I’m playing a Walking Dead video game, mowing down advertisements like walkers (or are they wallet-biters). I don’t exactly stab them in the head, but I summarily sweep them off into the trash, knowing full well that they will resurrect themselves in my inbox the next day. (And knowing all the while that some poor soul like me probably spent hours putting them together. I guess empathy has its limits.)

And I’m a total Scrooge about this obsession with days: Black Friday, Shop Small Saturday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday… Someday, I predict, all those days right up to Christmas, are going to be claimed and malls are going to release little retail versions of advent-type calendars from hell where you open the window at breakfast every morning to keep track of where you’re supposed to spend your money. Like lemmings, we’ll all pick up our calendar. (Should I just pick Thursday now?— Granola Thursday sounds kind of catchy.)

Like a good little lemming, I’ve put together a little guide to shopping at Providence Granola over the holidays

1. We now have a HOLIDAY GIFTS section on our web page. Check it out here.
2. We will participate in retail advent season with a site-wide 10% discount between Friday and Monday. Just use the promo-code: LEMMING. (That way we can all participate subversively.) If you order with the discount but prefer that your order go out closer to Christmas--just use the Note/Additional info box to give us an ideal mailing date. If you prefer to pay full price in support of our mission, just don't use the code.
3. Around December 1 we will start enclosing a PGP holiday card with all gift orders. You can see a low-resolution version here. If you put a note in the Note/Additional info box, we will put it on the card. Otherwise one of our employees will write “Thank you.”
4. Because our everything-plus-the-kitchen sink approach to a blog is intended to encourage you to stay a while and learn about social ventures and refugee employment, I’ve hidden a few turkeys in old blog entries. You can see an example at the bottom of this post. If you spend time browsing through our blog (while the Macy’s parade is on, maybe) and come across one of these, just enter the promocode on it into your order for a mystery discount. Note: some are in the unabridged Blog (accessed through the sidebar) not the blog summary. (As they are found and used, we will remove them.)
5. We are thrilled to be hosting a holiday challenge to visit a refugee sometime over the holidays. This—more than anything to do with granola—is at the heart of what we care about. We hope you’ll consider participating. You will be glad you did. We have a growing number of co-sponsors around the country who will also be available as liaisons to help you connect with a refugee in your area. To learn more, visit our guide for the challenge here. If you know of friends or organizations that might enjoy getting involved, please send them a link to the challenge or post it on your facebook page. We will be sending participants a coupon for some free granola.
6. We now offer gift certificates on our site. Check them out here.
7. We will be sending a fundraising appeal out in early December as part of our preparation to expand and advance our work in refugee employment. It goes without saying that there are lots of good causes to give toward this time of year—but we do love this work and don’t want to miss a chance to invite you to partner with us.
8. Finally, Beautiful Day is registered as a charitable organization with the Amazon Foundation. What this means is that you could support Beautiful Day every time you buy something at Amazon. Set up is an easy one-time deal. After that you a portion of all your purposes would support our work. To do this go to the Amazon Smile site and designate your charity.