Blog
Just Give Them the Pickle
By Teasha Cable
Can a pickle (or lack thereof) impede your economic growth?
Years ago, a regular customer at a small restaurant asked for an extra pickle with his sandwich, the same thing he'd asked for every visit for over a decade. This time, the staff said yes, but charged him fifty cents for it...and, he never came back.
When he finally wrote to the restaurant's owner explaining why, the owner landed on a rule that has outlasted the restaurant itself: "Just give them the pickle."
Do right by the customer, even when policy says you don't have to.
Read that 2x.
Kelsi Jackson, executive director of the Jackson County Tourist Development Council in Northwest Florida, built her entire tourism strategy around that story.
Not the marketing plan. Not the budget. The pickle.
Jackson County sits along the Alabama and Georgia line, nowhere near a coastline, nowhere near a theme park. Its county seat, Marianna, isn't a name most travelers know. But the county sits on springs, rivers, a state park with its own cave system, and a set of small towns that have never tried to be anything other than what they are.
Kelsi realized four years ago that the county didn't need a bigger marketing budget. It needed the people who actually meet visitors, gas station clerks, waffle house servers, gas pump attendants, to care enough to give them the pickle.
Kelsi came to the role from an unusual path. An Iowa native and Iowa State graduate, she had spent her earlier career at a Minneapolis company helping people navigate health insurance and, during the pandemic, connecting communities to housing, food, and education resources.
That background in public outreach turned out to matter more than any tourism credential. Her first day on the job, before she knew what the acronyms TDC or DMO even stood for, she was sent to Florida's statewide tourism conference and thrown in with the industry's most experienced operators. She spent her first year simply meeting people and listening for what the community actually needed.
Turning Skeptics Into Pickle-Givers
The problem Kelsi kept running into was an old one in rural tourism. A visitor walks into a gas station or a diner and asks the person behind the counter what there is to do around here, and the honest answer is often "I don't know, I just go to the beach" or "I stay home."
The frontline workers who meet the most visitors usually know the least about what their own county has to offer, and have the least reason to care.
So Kelsi built a Tourism Ambassador Program, a four to five month training series where frontline workers meet once a month to learn from marketing, business development, and customer service professionals.
The whole program runs on the pickle philosophy: give visitors the extra effort, the extra minute, the extra piece of local knowledge, even when nobody is requiring it of you. Jackson says the clearest proof it worked came from watching two of the program's most vocal early skeptics, people who had been openly negative about the county's tourism efforts online, turn into genuine cheerleaders, promoting local businesses on their own social media without being asked.
"You can't market your way out of a problem" Kelsi says, and the pickle logic is exactly why. No ad campaign fixes a visitor's experience if the person serving them doesn't know or care what the county offers. Jackson's first year in the role wasn't spent on marketing at all. It was spent fixing internal policy so grant funding and event support weren't buried under bureaucratic friction, clearing the way for a culture where giving the pickle was actually possible.
Deciding Who Gets the Pickle
The pickle story has a second half people forget. The restaurant didn't give every customer a free pickle. It gave the regular exactly what he'd always gotten, because that relationship was worth protecting. Kelsi runs her county's visitor strategy the same way, by being deliberate about who she's building the relationship with.
Rather than chasing overall visitor volume, her team tracks visitor type against economic and environmental impact. Cave divers, drawn by the county's underground systems, typically stay seven to fourteen days, spend heavily on gear, lodging, and meals, and leave a cave exactly as they found it.
Hunters follow a similar pattern, four to seven days, thousands of dollars in equipment, minimal strain on shared infrastructure.
Compare that to a day visitor tubing down the spring run who may leave litter behind without spending much locally at all. Florida Caverns State Park alone draws 100,000 to 130,000 visitors a year, and instead of only pushing more people through the gate, Kelsi's team focuses on converting that existing traffic into local dining, shopping, and overnight stays. 👏🏾
The same instinct shaped a public-private partnership at Jackson Blue Springs, where the county leased management of the spring to Cold Water Excursions, a private operator that added kayak rentals, snorkeling, and paddle trips.
Foot traffic at the site has since doubled and tripled.
Government, is rarely good at running day-to-day operations, but it's often good at making strategic investments.
Handing daily management to an operator built for it let the county focus on the bigger picture. None of this happens in isolation either. Kelsi's office shares space with the county's Chamber of Commerce and Main Street organization, and the three groups now align their strategic plans deliberately, including a joint education effort around roughly ten million dollars in active downtown revitalization grants.
Asked what advice she'd give another rural community trying to do the same thing, Jackson didn't point to budget or infrastructure first.
Find your story. Find what your story is and find the people that resonate with it, and focus on those audiences.
For Jackson County, the story turned out to be a magic pickle, and the discipline to actually give it to people has been enough.