Guide · October 6, 2026

Running food and drink across a multi-day fairground

A ground that has to work several days running does not reset overnight. What breaks on the last day is drift, and drift is fixed by writing the ground down.

The second day is not a repeat of the first

A single night is one set of decisions made once. A ground that opens for several days running is the same site asked to work again and again, each time with a different crowd, a partly different crew and sometimes a different set of counters open. The site does not reset overnight. Paper runs down, a stand gets shifted to make room for something else, a printer is unplugged so somebody can charge a phone, and a counter that sold one thing yesterday is told to sell another today.

So the last day looks nothing like the first. Day one is hardware and nerves, and it gets everybody's attention. By the end it is small undocumented changes stacked on each other, made by people who have gone home, and nobody on shift can say what the ground is meant to look like.

The fix is not more attention on the day. Decide before the gates open that the layout is built once and maintained after that: counters, their names, and which items belong to which of them, set and then left alone. What changes day to day is which counters are open and what they sell; make that change in the software in the morning, from something written down, not at a counter the moment an order lands on it.

Write the ground down, one sheet per counter

The most useful document on a multi-day site is a dull one: a page per counter with its name exactly as the software spells it, the items it sells, the device and printer that belong to it, and who to call when something stops. Keep a set in the office and tape a copy at the counter. The office copy is for planning; the counter copy is the one that gets read, because it is the only one in reach when a question comes up.

The crew will not be the same crew tomorrow

Multi-day sites run on people who are there for one shift or one day. Treat every day as though the staff are new, because at some counters they are. Anything that exists only in the head of yesterday's volunteer is gone, and the next person will reinvent it mid-service, differently.

A printed ticket quietly carries this for you. Somebody who has been at a counter ten minutes can read a name and a list of items off paper and hand the right thing to the right guest, knowing nothing else about the site. What they cannot do is infer the rules, so give them the sheet, the ticket, and the order the tickets come off the printer.

Close each day as if it were the last

Every counter should answer two questions before anyone goes home: how many tickets did we make, and does what we took agree with them. Doing that per counter, per day, turns a long event into a series of short ones. A counter that is drifting gets found on the day it starts, while the people who were there can still explain it, not at the end when all that is left is a total that will not add up.

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