The day boat ties up a little after two. Forty pounds of dry scallops in the hold, sweet enough to eat off the knife, and they will never taste better than they do this afternoon. Tomorrow they're still good. By the weekend they're a memory you're selling at a markdown.
Trouble is, the people who would gladly pay full price for those scallops are at a desk in Boston or running a crew in Hingham, and they have no idea the boat just landed.
So you sell to whoever happens to wander in, and you mark down what's left. The freshest thing you'll touch all week, matched to a buyer by foot traffic and luck. There's a better tool, and your customers are already carrying it. A simple text list, opt-in by item, so the moment the scallops land you send one message and the right forty people know inside a minute. Set it up once and it keeps working every season after.
Why a text beats an email for this
An email list is worth having, and we set those up too, but fresh catch is a right-now event. Most emails sit unread until evening, and by then your scallops are spoken for or going soft. A text gets looked at in minutes. People keep the phone on them on the dock, in the truck, between errands.
That speed is the whole point. The value of the alert lives in the first hour. You're not building a slow relationship here, you're closing the gap between the boat and the buyer while the catch is still at its peak.
Let people sign up for the item, not just 'the list'
The regular who drives forty minutes for scallops may not care one bit about your cod. If every text goes to everyone, that scallop lover starts deleting you, and the one message that mattered gets lost in the ones that didn't.
Break the list into the things people actually chase. Day-boat scallops. The first stripers of the season. Soft-shell crabs. Tuna when it runs. Your summer people might want tuna on a Friday, while your year-round locals want to know the second the scallops are in on a quiet Tuesday. Someone picks the items they want, and each broadcast reaches only the people who asked for that one thing. Smaller, hotter lists beat one big cold one every time.
Get the sign-up right, and keep it honest
Texting works because it's personal, which is exactly why the rules around it are strict. People have to opt in on purpose, and every message needs an easy way out (a plain 'reply STOP to leave' does it). Texting someone who never asked isn't just annoying, it's against the law, and it torches the trust you're trying to build.
The good news is that honest opt-in is easy at a fish counter. A card by the register, a line on the receipt, a small sign: 'Want a text when the day-boat scallops land? Leave your number.' The folks who sign up are your best customers raising their hands. Collect the number, the items they care about, and a clear yes. That's the whole setup.
What one good alert actually says
Keep it short, specific, and easy to act on. Your reader is standing in a parking lot looking at one thumb-length message. Tell them what landed, how much, the price, and how to claim it.
- What and how much: 'Day-boat scallops just in, about 40 lbs.'
- Price and window: '$24/lb, here till we sell out.'
- How to claim: 'Reply HOLD and a number and we'll set some aside.'
Letting people reserve a pound by replying does two things. It turns an alert into a sale before anyone leaves the house, and it tells you when to stop texting because you're already sold through.
Where AI helps, and where it doesn't
The quiet part of all this is the bookkeeping, and that's what a little automation handles well. It holds the list, keeps the items sorted, drafts the message in your voice, sends it to the right group, processes the STOP replies so you stay on the right side of the law, and tracks who asked to hold what. We install these, and they run in the background without much fuss.
Be clear about the limit, though. No software knows the scallops are beautiful today or that the stripers came in small. You taste it, you judge it, you press send. The tech is genuinely simple. The real work is the discipline: text only when it's worth it, and don't cry wolf.
Restraint is what keeps the list valuable. One or two messages a week per item is plenty, and in the shoulder season, when the crowds thin and you can't count on foot traffic, that list is still right there in everyone's pocket. The first time you blast a so-so catch to make a quick buck, people notice, and the next STOP is one you earned.
Worth setting up this week
You don't need much to get going, and you don't need to wait for the season to turn.
- Pick the three or four items people actually drive in for, and make those your first lists.
- Put a sign-up card at the register and add one line to the receipt, asking for a number and which items they want.
- Write your standard alert once, with blanks for the catch, the pounds, and the price, so sending it takes ten seconds on a busy dock.
- Set up the STOP reply and a simple HOLD reply so people can claim their share before they drive over.
- Send the first one the next time something genuinely good lands, and watch how fast it moves.
Do it once and it pays off every season, long after you've forgotten who happened to walk in that first afternoon. If you'd like a hand wiring it together, that's the kind of quiet, useful work we're glad to do.