Following on from a past posting about Farmers' Markets. Let me ask you a question, how does a farmers' market cope if the community has no cash point and poor signal for the reception of wireless credit and debit card readers? It could be said that some communities would not have held that farmers' market.
Shipbourne, a village in Kent, had different thoughts and they introduced "The Shipbourne Pound" in denominations of £2 and £5 from the idea of the market manager, Bob Taylor.
The idea is that if customers run out of money they can buy the Shipbourne pounds with a debit card from the nearby pub "The Chaser Inn". This reduces the thought of potential customers leaving Shipbourne in order to find money due to the problems listed above.
The Shipbourne pound depicts the village's church, St. Giles, both in summer and winter as well as Sir Henry Vane - a knighted parliamentarian under Cromwell. The manager of The Chaser Inn, Darren Somerton, talks of the Shipbourne Pound, on the website thisiskent.co.uk, that "We are delighted to work with the market on this new project, offering a
new service to the local community, and a further boost to local food
producers."
Do you know of any other schemes like this that your local market or farmers' market use to entice customers? I have heard of a scheme in Hawick, Lewes and Totnes, it was even discussed on Ambridge but never implemented.
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