Back In The Saddle Again
Well, I’m back after eight business days away from PJP. And this may sound overly dramatic, but I’m not certain I’ve ever needed more of a break than this summer. For whatever reason - the long hours at PJP, the mental stress of the pandemic, the worrying about keeping us open and operating, the kids out of school, THE ALL OF IT - my burnout was reaching critical levels. I needed a fresh perspective and a little distance from it all. And that’s not to say I didn’t think about PJP, because remember I needed to teach Jeanne to make shipping labels while I was beachside. But also, Behind-the-Scenes Jason and the kids and I talked about PJP quite a bit. In short, I needed to get out of the PJP forest to see a few PJP trees, if that makes any sense.
So let’s roundup what went down while I was gone:
Jeanne and Team PJP slayed at keeping us up and running. The store didn’t burn down, a full selection of pies were created every day, and everyone seemed to get along and fair just fine without me. SO PROUD.
I’ll tell you who missed me - the inventory system. I’m not sure what happened by the end of last week, but this morning I discovered we had -22 peach pies in stock. I think implementing a new - and math based - inventory system right before I left was ambitious. At any rate, our goal is to figure out what is in the store at any given moment so that when we have two stores, we can plan the stock more easily. And when we have 300 stores, we aren’t making guesses about what each store needs to produce.
Honestly, if we had 300 stores, I would still want to FaceTime them all every day so they could show me the shelves so I could assess the half-off inventory and give feedback on the baking schedule. That sort of thing would land me an appearance on Undercover Boss (they should really bring that show back, or at least stream it on Netflix).
Speaking of math based, I was going through the mail and found the renewal form for our city business license. I have no idea how I have a post-graduate degree and have increased our annual sales by 257% since opening, but yet the math on this annual form stops me dead in my tracks. You are supposed to pay .25 cents for every $1,000 in gross sales you did in the previous year. This isn’t a math lesson, but I’m here to tell you that if you take your gross sales by .25, you will almost die of a heart attack because that number is NOT a tidy sum. While I’ve got some opinions on the tax base and fee structures in this city, I’ll concede that the amount I calculated is NOT what the city is expecting to receive.
Behind-The-Scenes Jason showed up and completed it for me and I still can’t tell you how it is done. It’s my own fault for tuning out of all those “if Bob has 37 watermelons and he wants to cut them into equal servings to serve 125 people, how many pieces should he cut” math problems in junior high. I’m not sorry. We don’t even live in a world where 125 people can eat watermelon together, unless they are six feet apart. And then that creates a whole secondary problem because how much space do you need for 125 people to stand six feet apart and eat watermelon? I feel like if you are a junior high math teacher, your lessons are basically just going to write themselves this fall.
