It’s another year and another chance to keep the legend alive! For the fourth year in a row, we’ve been the “Full-Sized Candy Bar House” in our neighborhood. Just like last year, we’re tracking candy selections using a pair of Notion databases. While this has continued to work well, the actual experience of doing the tracking in real-time is a bit too slow when group sizes reach above 3 people. I have some ideas on how to speed this up with buttons and automation in Notion, but that’s a problem for next year.
As always, if you’d like to dig into the data yourself or follow along with this post in a side-browser, have at it:
This year, we cut back on the sheer variety we had. Last year we had 40 different items. This year, we cut that down to 25 varieties of candy and one bonus toy. This seems to have cut down on option-paralysis and made our inventory much easier to manage. Keeping the selection curtailed with a few specific experiments seems to be the best way going forward.
From an unrelated project, I had a lot of 3D printed articulated sheep laying around.
The model is “Articulated Sheep” by Teigan Blackshaw. It’s a wonderful model, easy to print, and super cute.
I printed far too many of these…
So I figured I could pawn them off on the neighborhood trick-or-treaters 🙂. Before anyone thinks I cheated someone out of candy - The sheep was a “Bonus Item” you could take if you wanted to. Most trick-or-treaters opted to take both a piece of candy and a sheep. One trick-or-treater opted out of the sheep, taking only candy. No trick-or-treaters took only a sheep.
I started with 15 sheep and the inventory was exhausted in 40 minutes.
3D printing articulated toys and models isn’t really hard, and it isn’t really expensive. I’m still pondering, but I think I may try to put out a few different toy varieties in various colors next year. There are no shortage of great models to choose from.
Lesson Learned: We should have different databases because manually excluding the sheep in calculations annoys me. I should optimize for laziness wherever possible.
We didn’t think these would be popular, but wanted to confirm our suspicions. You’ll see in the data later, we were sadly correct. Well… maybe not “sadly”, because we get to dispose of them ourselves.
Lesson Learned: We like Twizzlers, nobody else does.
I think Nerds Rope and Nerds Gummy Clusters are some of my favorite “newer” candies. While they weren’t “unpopular”, they never hit the highs I was expecting from that candy. That said, we have a theory as to why they didn’t take off at the start of the evening and picked up towards the end: