Cheers To Tuesdays.
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times…Mondays are undoubtedly the most difficult day of the week at PJP. I’ll take any Saturday with three full pages of order pickups and a line at the door at 10 am before I take your standard Monday and here’s why:
We start with exceptionally little inventory in the store. As you likely know, we sell all dessert pies at 1/2 price between 4 and 5 pm on Saturdays to clear out the store as much as possible before being closed on Sundays. That is usually a pretty effective way to give all the pies a home, leaving not much in the store on Monday to sell at half-price at open.
That means by 10 am we probably have a lot of pies baked, but relatively little cooled enough to box and put out on the shelves. That leaves us listing off options to customers for purchase hot off the trays and that feels chaotic to me. I don’t think customers necessarily feel that, but I like the aesthetic in the stores to be perfect because no one is harder on me than me.
All of our food delivery trucks arrive on Monday. I started my morning making Cherry Custard at Nifong, only to open the refrigerator and remind myself that the sour cream I needed was on the delivery truck slated for arrival between 3:08pm and 5:48pm. Did you know a large tub of sour cream at Hyvee is $8.97? That is literally outrageous but completely more convenient than Aldi. I’ve learned you can want lower prices or you can want easy, but pick one because both is impossible.
And when the food trucks arrived with over $2,000 worth of food for each store, we were shorted pecans, cornstarch, and rhubarb. And that’s how I ended up at Sam’s this afternoon in the pouring rain to buy enough pecans to cover us for the next few days. (They didn’t have cornstarch or rhubarb, but I’ve lived this life long enough to not carry those sorts of expectations in my heart.)
30 pounds of pecans cost us around $194 from our wholesaler. 24 pounds of pecans cost us around $156 from Sam’s. Honestly, that’s not as hateful as I would have guessed. Though the ones from Sam’s don’t come pre-chopped and chopped is a very subjective ask from our baking crew. Some people think that means nut dust and some think it means a mostly whole pecan. I’m adding on an imaginary $25 surcharge for the hit on consistency we will take this week. And a $25 surcharge for standing in line at Sam’s behind someone purchasing a flat bed of onion rings. I bet their food truck forgot to bring those to them as a well, so I can’t even be that mad.
Cheers to Tuesday.
