Official Welcome
Today broke my soul a little bit and if that isn’t the official welcome to the fall baking season, then I don’t know what is. We experienced two of the dumbest things we’ve seen in a while, so let’s talk about that:
All food brokers require a minimum order, typically $500 and 15 cases of product. And since all food product averages a million dollars or so these days, the $500 can be met by basically logging into the website. So when one vendor shorted us evaporated milk this week because they were out of stock, our count dropped back to 13 cases. The vendor asked that we choose two other items for delivery and I respectfully declined because I’m not buying two things I don’t need just because they are out of evaporated milk (though the online inventory system reported hundreds of cans available). Then the vendor replied and said he would send us two cases of gloves to meet the 15 case requirement, but we could just reject the gloves when the truck arrived with the 13 things I needed and the two cases of gloves I didn’t. Which means that someone - or actually a team of people - think the best way to handle shorting a business two cases is to have the warehouse pick two cases that we don’t want, someone load it on to the truck, a driver to truck it over and carry it in, and me to say that I don’t want it. And then the driver take it back to the truck, load it up, drive it back, and the warehouse check it back in and then someone put it back on the shelf. ALL SO WE CAN SAY I ORDERED 15 CASES.
Earlier this year, we purchased all new kitchen equipment for PJP West, including two double door commercial freezers from Maxx Cold. When one freezer started to fail not long ago despite being only a few months old, a repairman visited and proclaimed the unit faulty because a pallet of the freezers had fallen and warped the doors, making them unable to seal to the unit and keep the cold air in. The warranty provided for a complete replacement of the unit. Today it just showed up at PJP West on a semi truck driven by a third party delivery driver. Except his truck didn’t have a lift gate and we don’t own any sort of equipment to unload a 600 pound freezer off a semi truck because we are a pie shop and not a Uline warehouse. And even if we did, Maxx Cold expected us to figure out a way to get the unit inside, unpacked off a pallet, and set in place. Oh, and to package up the broken one on a pallet, wrap it in protective materials, and find a semi truck way to ship it back to where ever Maxx Cold is located. Even though they broke the unit by dropping it in the first place. And since all of that is an impossibility, the driver just left with our replacement freezer and literally no one has any input on how proceed (least of all the Missouri based business that sold us $75,000 worth of equipment in January, because this new development “it isn’t their problem”). And honestly, anyone involved in a discussion to remove a commercial freezer off a semi truck onto a sidewalk in front of a pie shop should consider it their problem because WHAT ELSE ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO. And look, I don’t know anything about commercial transport, but how did that guy even get it on his truck and what did he expect when he arrived? Does not Peggy Jean’s Pies just scream “WE DON’T HAVE A LOADING DOCK”?
So, for those reasons, I’m over it today. Not to mention a complete and total weirdo just hung around PJP Nifong for 20 minutes today while I was there alone just staring at me while I assessed if he was just creepy weird or creepy creepy. Though I did wonder if he would be available to help schlep a freezer off a semi truck later in the week…
