Research

I mean this in the nicest possible way to ASU, but I never thought all those library classes on reareaching and using databases was ever going to benefit me outside of writing research papers for classes, turns out I was wrong!
A food vendor wanting to operate a booth at a City of Glendale event has to pay a specified amount (that ranges on the size and length of the event) plus 20% of their gross sales. Until now, the City of Glendale has been using the honor system and counting on the honesty of the vendors in reporting their actual gross income from the events. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who aren't as honest as they could be, so the time has come to look for an alternative method in determining gross sales of our food vendors. On March 20, I get to take a little road trip to Tucson with several of my co-workers to attend the Spring Fair held on 4th Ave. there, the producers invited us to attend, get a backstage look at what they do, and most importantly, learn about register tape and how they use it. Here is a link to the Spring Fair map http://www.intucsonnow.com/4thave.html
Register tape is simply a long list of transactions and amounts printed from the register once transactions are complete for the day, obviously someone not wanting to report all their income for the day simply doesn't have to enter a chunk of their transactions into the register. That being the case, I was asked to research what other festivals that require a percentage fee from their vendors are doing to ensure they get accurate counts.
I began googling "festival percentage fee", "vendor percentage", "vendor fee" and so on without any luck. I asked my supervisor for some help and was given a few more phrases to work off of. Google wasn't helping, so I tried Google Scholar, surely methods for obtaining accurate vendor incomes is something as important as counting crowds at an event, and I was convinced someone had to have written an article on the topic. With still no luck, I decided to put my education to good use and hit up the ASU Library web site and tried my luck and searching skills with LexisNexus and Ebsco Host- unfortunately I never found anything, but how cool would it have been to have turned in a peer reviewed article from a scholarly journal on proven methods for obtaining vendor totals!?!?!
As a final shot I began googling vendor applications and reading through them to find out who else out there is actually charging their vendors a percentage fee, then finding their contact info and actually e-mailing the person in charge to ask them how they do it! I sent 7 or 9 e-mails and one person wrote back right away about how they use register tape, and I had a phone conversation with someone in Frisco, Colorado this morning about how her event uses tickets to keep track of consumer spending. I am still hoping a few more people will write back before Tuesday when I'll present my findings at our weekly event meeting- I'll let you know how it goes.
In the meantime, check out our website, www.glendaleaz.com/events, we have the 26th Gendale Gibson Jazz and Blues Festival coming up April 4th and 5th so mark your calendars!