Here are a couple of screenshots from our Management System - the page that shows reservations made for our Print Parties. These are for March and April this spring (as of this afternoon). The red numbers are the reservations for each time slot:

Starting around the middle of March and extending right through next week or so, we are basically booked solid.

And even as I write this - on the 14th - we are booked almost totally solid for the next week, with more reservations coming in every day. It seems as though we have reached 'Peak Party'.

So what next? Where do we go from here? Well, this is the spring tourist season, so it should begin to taper off in a few weeks. But even so, the trend is clear - demand for our Print Parties has pretty much reached the limit of our abilities to provide the service.

The only way forward is to get more staff members into the rotation, and open up more slots (8:30am, 16:00pm, 18:00pm), but just where such people will come from is not so clear. Previously, I have always instantly refused work requests from foreigners living here in Japan (their husband is here working for a bank for a couple of years, etc. etc.) because it just didn't seem worthwhile to spend all the time training them, just to have them disappear after a relatively short time. In desperation though, a few weeks back, I relented on this policy, and we now have a couple of these people on board to help out. I think we can perhaps explore this a bit further, by taking the time to set up an actual training plan (perhaps to take place on our nominal closing day of Tuesdays), where some of our experienced staffers can train these people, who would then be available to fit into the rotation a couple of days each week. If we can build up a 'pool' of such new members, then it wouldn't be particularly crippling each time one of them left.

And I guess that means we have to create a training manual, set up a kind of curriculum, and organize regular practice sessions, all to teach people how to teach people how to make prints!