Now That I Think About It...
In case you haven't heard by now, we had a booth at this weekend's Roots and Blues festival. I might have mentioned it two or three or 847 times. And if you didn't hear it from me, well, you might have seen the front page of the Saturday Columbia Daily Tribune...
I'm still working through a lot of the numbers to figure out just how many pies we sold, but here are a few thoughts in the interim...
- Without question, we made enough to cover our expenses (and even some to put into the long-term PJP planning fund). WHEW. I felt like I wrote an inordinate amount of checks last week to prep for the weekend and as I knew we covered particular expenses, I felt less stressed.
- Beyond the sales of pies, the intangible benefits of meeting so many new people and explaining #WorldPieDomination was completely worth all the effort of being there. In our marketing materials, we encouraged people to Join The Movement...and I know we have some new members after the past few days.
- Working at a festival for three days is ridiculously hard. I know that sounds sort of silly...and I perhaps I would have scoffed at the notion a mere few days ago, but listen to me: IT IS VERY HARD. I even exhausted my own extrovert personality, because woo-ing in 20,000-ish passing potential customers isn't for the timid or shy.
- People walking by and peering into our booth without stopping gave me a complex, by the way. It was like when you host a garage sale and someone drives by in their car really slowly and just looks at your stuff without stopping. WHY? IS THE STUFF NOT GOOD ENOUGH?
- Our booth was located between the Jamaican Jerk Hut and a family operation from Sedalia that served up corn dogs and funnel cakes and frozen lemonade. Both vendors do a festival just about every single weekend in the fall and so when I complained that I was tired as we started to break down our booths last night, they all just laughed. Apparently, I lack festival stamina. And a deep fryer.
- Why are funnel cakes so delicious? It is a mystery of our universe.
- As challenging and tiring as it was, I got to hang out with one of my besties for a few days and drink beer and sell pies to music lovers while listening to great music. They should quote me in the materials they send out to entice vendors to sign up for a booth, because who doesn't think that sounds like a great weekend?
- Jeanne headed up the crew at PJP Buttonwood, wherein they baked hundreds and hundreds of pies, boxed them, and delivered them to our booth. She was in her element, but by yesterday, even she was too tired to tackle a deep clean of PJP Buttonwood after the final trays went into the oven.
- I clearly got the better end of the deal when it comes to baking pies versus selling pies.
- Now that I think about it, there should be a company that specializes in disaster cleanup for situations like ours. A team that comes in and scrapes the floor free of dough and removes the errant flour from every surface and puts us back in order for a return to a normal week on Tuesday morning...just like working for hours over the weekend never happened. (Now that I think about it, Jeanne may leave me with PJP once she reads this idea.)