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SO HOW WAS 2001 FOR US?

2001 was a real roller-coaster year! Britain had Foot and Mouth Disease from February onwards (although we have had no cases now for two months). We went to our son's wedding in Las Vegas in April and then there was the horrific tragedy on 11 September. Finally, Tetbury almost came to a halt for several weeks before Christmas due to repairs on our historic market hall which caused gridlock through the town centre.

Our tourist business was obviously affected by most of the above but the year has ended overall well up in business for us. Our three main activities (retail, wholesale, and internet sales) were all up, especially our internet sales. A BIG THANK YOU to all of you who used our internet site and placed orders. The week before Christmas was terribly hectic but we managed to get all internet orders out on time (even though this meant depriving ourselves of food and sleep!) and, hopefully, everyone enjoyed their Christmas/New Year cheese.

The website had over 300,000 hits during December with over 3,500 visits which, for a relatively small business such as ours, is staggering. This was of course helped by our site being featured in the national newspapers, although we received orders this year from all over the world including Japan, Egypt, Australia, and the USA. We would remind you that we only deliver to the UK but the nature of the internet is international and customers can order from anywhere in the world to send gifts to their friends and families in the UK.

We have decided to change a few things for 2002. Firstly, to cut our costs and avoid price increases on our site, we will not post a paper copy of the invoice to customers who send cheese to their friend and family; instead, we will simply e-mail the customer to let them know how much we are charging to their credit card. Remember that we cannot cut exact weights so there is almost always a small adjustment unless you have ordered a cheese selection, in which case we always absorb any overcuts.

Secondly, as most of our orders are for mainland UK delivery and carriage charges for non-mainland addresses can often be very steep, we have had to introduce a £10 surcharge for these non-mainland addresses, in addition to our £6 postage charge. See our FAQs page for more details.

Our internet business during the week before Christmas is almost as much as we can now deal with. For Christmas 2002 please order early, even if you wish to delay despatch of an order, as we may have to de-activate our website when we reach a point when we cannot physically cope with any more orders. It may be of interest to know that the easiest orders for us to make up are those which are whole cheeses (such as Stilton and Cheddar truckles) and those which are cheese selections. We can prepare perhaps ten such orders in the time that it takes us to cut, wrap and label an order of twelve or more different cutting cheeses. Any help you can give us next Christmas along these lines would therefore be appreciated! Maybe the answer is for us to limit our site to cheese selections and whole cheeses just before Christmas - we still have to make a few decisions here but will let you know before next year!

As the number of visits to our site increased dramatically during December the website was slower to use for some people and a few people telephoned us to say they could not place orders. These were almost always Apple Mac users with the latest Windows version. Don't ask us why these people can't place orders on our site - we don't know either! Luckily, there are always real people here at the end of a phone line who can help you when the latest modern technology fails you!

One area where we have problems, not of our making, is when it comes to deliveries which are made very late in the day or not on the day requested. We pay for Next Day Delivery and every order sent out this year has been on the day requested by the customer. However, particularly during the run-up to Christmas, there have been a few occasions where the delivery was made late in the evening or early the next morning. We apologise for this but it is worth bearing in mind that no carrier will guarantee next day delivery 100%.

We are now looking forward to our annual break so remember that the ordering facility will be disabled on our website from mid-January to mid-February.

A VERY HAPPY 2002 TO ALL OUR READERS!