Why do I have a fee on my account?

Dear farm member who owns a part of a cow on our lovely farm:

Thank you for your recent inquiry about bottle charges.

We have kept records each and every delivery day for who has returned bottles.  Our policy is: Return the same amount of bottles you picked up full with milk the week before.  You picked up 2 last week?  Return 2 this week.  We at the farm like simple math.

We don’t require you to make extra trips to get there before our delivery guy.  We just calculate returned bottles from two weeks prior delivery document.

What? How does that work?

Answer: when you pick up fresh milk, leave same amount of empty bottles from previous week’s delivery. They sit there for a week until Jon comes back to deliver fresh milk.  He picks up those lonely bottles, which as that point have been away from the farm for two weeks and miss us. He lines up those bottles, records the names and quantities and sends that info right from the drop site in an email to our office.  We have a long list of these emails.

It is has been a very busy summer, so it has just been now that we are tackling these records.  At this point, the fees you see listed are from bottles not returned from the first half of the summer.  We DO, however, check each time before we charge the fee whether a customer has been on vacation that week.  If so, we don’t charge for the missing bottle as we understand you weren’t there to return it.

Why such a big deal? We need bottles returned each week to be able to fill milk orders for the coming week.  We are at a point now that because we could not calculate bottles returns all summer and people became relaxed about returning, we are scrambling at the beginning of each week to have enough bottles for our deliveries.

So if you see a charge, there was a week where you did not return bottles.  There is no way we can check bottles delivered weeks later as being accounted for that particular week it should have brought back (so we could fill it up and send it back out again when we needed it.)  However, upon your word  we will refund fees if you have indeed at some point sent all your bottles back to the farm.  And in the future, always return the same amount of bottles you picked up the week before when you pick up your fresh milk.

Thank you for your efforts to help us continue on our road to sustainability.  We are a small operation, run on the power of vision and volunteers and it takes our farm members support and efforts to make it all work!

Sincerely,

Your Farm Team, C’est Naturelle Farms

And for your entertainment: A Video on how to mark your bottles for return