Harder to figure out a polite way out when the person is a regular customer. Fortunately once it became clear I had both studied religions in university and stayed areligious it started to click for her that I wasn't a good candidate. She still left with a "if you have any questions ask anytime"

Is my body emitting special pheromones tonight? 3 times being approached by near-or-complete strangers inside of 90 minutes has to be a Japan record for me.

He finally asked me for 500 yen for food. I'm a bit short of cash these days so I begged off.

Only to head home and stop at the My Basket, where the grandma that scared off dozens of potential homebuyers next to her old house approached me and started telling me her life story.

Unfortunately even trying to look up words was taken as encouragement. Only my "I have some work to do" started to slow her down.

It's a sort of nationalistic Pure Land Buddhist sect. They somehow broke off from the Shoshu side. They're sort of like Sokka Gakkai but without a political organization.

Boring cult, I imagine. I probably even learned about it during lectures in Germany under Dr Pye but long forgot details.

I tried to show awareness but not interest. I never learned most of the terminology around pure land buddhism in Japanese itself, but I am sufficiently aware of it because of my East Asian studies major. I had classes by Dr. Paul Watt and Dr. Michael Pye, both focused heavily on Japanese religion.

If your core target customers don't want it, your options are seeking new customers or going back to the drawing board. But it doesn't sound like these kinds of errors are quick fix material. And if you're a media organization, trust is more important than output. You lose trust you lose relevance.

And when I say tangible value, I mean that the customers see the value as tangible. Not the vendor of the solution.

If your media consumers don't value the work product, your other customers (advertisers, distributors) won't either. So who is this for? Shareholders?

I removed the actual sales numbers partially because it's proprietary and partially because it's sorta embarrassing. I don't have a problem with the distribution, but I need the numbers to be a bit over double where they are now.

Actually they did ask about the price for a whole batch before I made it. I'm generally ok with custom orders as long as I can sell enough for it to make sense. Biggest problem with this recipe is that one component isn't readily available to home cooks (can be made but will taste much different)

My shop is "from" Seattle. I feel like I missed an opportunity to use a cute way of expressing that in English instead of katakana.

The caramel sauce I was given as a free sample by one of my vendors, but I know it's way above budget for the usage I have. I can make it a bit more cost effectively with condensed milk, but I'm not looking forward to the inevitable moment when I have to calculate the true cost.

It's not super hard to make; it's probably 20 minutes of active work when I use a prepared (but expensive) caramel. But I kept dragging my feet.

Today they came in and bought half. I gave them a bit of a discount.

Dinner still isn't quite working. The bulk of our dinner sales happen before 8pm. And later sales are often people that want dessert or coffee more than dinner, which doesn't let us hit the magic numbers we need unless there's additional takeout business.