Have you ever driven by a new store and seen people going in and out and wonder how you could have missed the hoopla that surrounds a Grand Opening? Well chances are the Grand Opening hasn’t happened yet and what you see is a soft opening.

A soft opening is an unannounced opening of a store that allows for the evaluation of operations in order to correct them before a highly publicized grand opening which might highly publicize said problems. It also helps an entire staff of new employees put their training into effect under less stressful circumstances.

If you have the patience to take part in the exercise as a customer, it can be rewarding. I got a free meal when a restaurant did a soft opening and there are tales of the lucky amusement park attendees who have been offered a chance to ride hot new rides before the offical opening date.

It occurred to me this weekend that the practice would be helpful for new performing arts facilities. On July 1st the new center at Bethel Woods opened with the New York Philharmonic. Most readers may be more familiar with the locale as the site of Woodstock after the folks in Woodstock, NY in Ulster County withdrew their permission for the 1969 performance. (That hasn’t kept you from cashing in on the name though has it, Woodstock :P)

Bethel Woods had a good opportunity to do a soft opening on June 21 when the Mid-Hudson Philharmonic played there to allow the pavillon and orchestra shell designers to make adjustments. They did have employees there for training in preparation for the opening that night. However, given that access to the site is by narrow winding roads (I am from that part of NY, I have driven to the grounds) and the fact that weeks of torrential rains have battered Sullivan County there were a lot of details that a soft opening could have brought to the fore. (As a guy who ran a few outdoor music festivals in a rural environment upon which it had rained before and during, I can speak with some authority. Boy, do they have my empathy!)

I know someone who worked the opening day and she was fairly critical of the disorganization that she saw. To be fair, some of it was going to happen even with the benefit of the soft opening. Short of implanting mind control chips in the concert goers, some of it will still be happening in 5 years. (And it was certainly more organized than Woodstock was!)

But there were a lot of avoidable problems that a soft opening would have certainly revealed and there were a lot of people who said they would never come back again as they left. That probably won’t impact the Ashlee Simpson concert on Sunday since there most likely isn’t a big audience overlap. You also can’t please everyone even under the best conditions. It just seems a shame to make such a poor first impression to such a large audience of people who, lets face it, tend to be influential.

Most of us won’t be involved with the opening of new facilities but those that are would do well to at least consider a soft opening. I will confess though that I did have a hand in the opening of a new facility. We didn’t have a soft opening and everything went very well.

But as I said, I was there.