Dear Friends,

Labor Day Weekend is upon us, and while Small Dog Electronics has traditionally been closed on Labor Day. However, in the world of retail, that is not possible and is actually against our lease in at least one store. Manchester, NH and S. Burlington, VT locations will be open while Waitsfield is closed.

We use CTO (Combined Time Off) at Small Dog Electronics so our workers don’t really lose the holiday — they have the ability to take a day off when they want. We combine vacation, sick, holiday, and personal days into CTO and let our employees manage their time. I really don’t want to be policing sick days or personal days. We have only a few restrictions — we demand that vacations be taken as a block of time, not a day here and a day there, and we ask that our employees schedule their time off in advance whenever possible.

Labor Day celebrates the economic and social contributions of workers but is also the unofficial end of summer. The local snack bar at the Maynard Farm closes, football season begins and schools are back in session. It is also the start of new product announcements, too. Apple has something scheduled for September 12th and while it is not a product announcement, Small Dog Electronics will have a special press conference and announcement next Wednesday in Rutland, Vermont. We will report on both in Kibbles next week!

Do you back up your data? I was talking to my retail managers this morning about how we should be evangelists about backing up data. That is always one of the questions I ask customers, how are you going to back up your data? Do you know that hard drives spin at high RPM and that they fail frequently? With a Mac, backing up your data cannot be easier. Time Machine is a life-saver. (See our G-DRIVE Mini special below.)

I love telling about the time I was vacationing in Mexico and had my MacBook Pro stolen from my hotel room. I lost a couple of pictures that I had uploaded to that Mac, but once I was back in Vermont (with my check from the hotel), I grabbed a new MacBook Pro, hooked it up to my Time Machine backup drive and I was up and operating with all of my data in a very short time. As my friend David Lerner from Tekserve in NYC says, “may you have 1,000 backups and never need one…”