Garbage

If you don’t live here, just know that it was over 100 degrees this afternoon in mid-Missouri. According to Accuweather, the Real Feel temperature at 2:31 this afternoon was 124 degrees. And if I’ve said once, I’ve said it 100 times: super hot temperatures are garbage for sales.

Our air conditioning was working at both stores, but a five ton unit struggles to keep up with four convection ovens operating all morning. Once we can turn those ovens off, it helps…but not enough to define the space as cool or comfortable. I took a brief respite and took a quick stroll through the beer freezer at Hyvee’s liquor department. Even then, Jason and I decided the best course of action was to send a 50% off coupon to our over 9,000 text subscribers and see if we could find homes for all dessert pies and then we could all go home early.

The moral of this story is that hot temperatures make for sluggish full price pie sales. But they do just fine for half-price pie sales. We sold out both stores in less than 30 minutes and all retreated to our homes free of large commercial appliances.

So for those of you wondering if the entrepreneurial journey ever gets easier, the answer is sometimes you have to do crazy things to mitigate the impacts of August heat domes. (Look, I learned about heat domes on Tik Tok, so don’t expect details. I just know we are in one and it has to do with jet streams.)

Tomorrow we will start completely from scratch with empty shelves, which is unfortunate for me because I’m on the whip table at Nifong and making whipped cream when it is hot in our store is harder than you anticipate. But as long as we run the to the refrigerator with the finished product, it works out just fine. But trying get all the fruit pies to cool down to be boxed is another story. Please don’t judge me if you see me in the Hyvee beer cooler with a rolling rack of hot pie tomorrow morning…