Concrete Jungle
Yesterday marked our first anniversary at PJP Nifong, which we celebrated by not celebrating. And since today is a Monday, we couldn’t think of a single interesting thing to do in here to mark the occasion…except bake a lot of pies, sell a lot of pies, and avoid my office because my freshman high schooler had a full day of Zoom classes. (And our Internet at home is entirely too janky for both kids to be able to Zoom all day, so she comes with me. 0/10 stars for rural broadband access.)
But anyway, here is all the things we’ve learned in the past year:
We are producing at almost quadruple the volume of PJP Buttonwood, but the larger space makes it seem like less work. Weird, right?
But we still need more space than we originally planned. Our back hallway looks like a pie box and pie tin storage facility…which is I guess is an improvement over our old space, when we used to pile that all on the front bench at PJP Buttonwood like the classy joint that we were.
Unless you are using our bathrooms in our current space and then you probably wonder if we couldn’t find a nicer home for all of our boxes of boxes. We’ve tried, I promise.
Walking proximity to Hyvee is the low key MVP of the last year. (We could have walked from the old store, I guess. But why, when we could drive? Ahem.)
But I miss my morning walk to Starbucks. I’ve been pretty settled on my morning mobile order routine, but most days you can’t mobile order and the line for the drive-thru is out onto Buttonwood because they are short staffed due to COVID. I’ve started making iced coffee at home, but my head always hurts by 10 am. It isn’t cheaper if you need double the amount to prevent a caffeine withdrawal headache.
I do regret not adding a washer and dryer so that we could do our own aprons and towels. That would have been some solid forethought on my part. No worries, I’ll make a note for the next store.
Though, at least once a week, someone on Team PJP says “how did we ever survive with just two ovens?” So adding in two more ovens was an expensive but smart move.
That said, Jeanne is still salty a full 365 days later that we couldn’t achieve her walk-in cooler dreams. In discussions about a second store, she always leads off with her desire to have a walk-in cooler. Hey, did you know she wants a walk-in cooler? GAH.
And before she corrects me in the morning for not stating it, I promise she would also like a walk-in freezer. Even though I have an irrational fear of getting locked in one. It pairs nicely with my irrational fear of the IRS.
But we wouldn’t change anything about our dough room. That room is the heart of the whole space. It’s a concrete jungle where dreams are made of. Wait, that’s what Jay-Z said about New York. And what Jeanne says about the PJP dough room. Same thing, right?
