Several Thoughts.

There are a lot of perks to having two stores…it certainly helps balance the work load for big orders, it increases our efficiencies overall, and it simply means we can do more, but with generally less stress. (I guess. I’m basically always stressed so what do it know?). But at any rate, when one store feels pretty calm, then generally the other store has a lot of interesting stuff going on. That was the case this week, as Nifong was smooth sailing through calm seas and West was ripe with drama. Here we go:

For starters, West had the first overt and intentionally planned theft in PJP history. On Saturday afternoon, a woman walked into West and selected several pies from the shelves. She also picked up a four-pack of the Peggy Jean’s Pies Pecan Pie Porter, the Logboat collaboration beer we did last fall. One of our employees mentioned to her that the beer wasn’t for sale, rather it is just self-promoting decor (my words, not hers). The woman looked at the employee and turned and walked straight out with the pies and beer, only to push on the side of the double doors that we keep locked. This all caused a ruckus and other customers became involved, yelling for the woman to stop and snapping pictures of her. She then rushed out the correct door and into the double parked car that was running with a male driver behind the wheel. One customer took a picture of the license plate and one employee followed her out to the car, yelling at her to stop.

So, several thoughts:

1. This theft was during our half price hour on Saturday afternoon. That makes this story all the more offensive.

2. I don’t understand people.

3. Our Logboat collaboration re-releases in a few weeks. We won’t be able to sell it, but you best believe we will decorate both stores with it with zero shame.

4. One customer called the police, but the police never called us. Though, the cell reception at Roots and Blues was garbage and so this all went down and we knew nothing about it for at least an hour because we couldn’t get texts or phone calls.

5. The whole experience was just weird.

And once we recovered from that drama and from Roots and Blues, another semi-truck showed up at West on Monday with a new freezer to replace the broken freezer we purchased in February. It also arrived last week, but without a lift gate or any way to remove the freezer from the truck to PJP. So after a lot of tussling around, Jason secured us White Glove service and the truck on Monday had a lift gate. The driver took the freezer off the truck and just left it in the parking lot. It was up to Jason to wrangle it through the door and then uncrate it, and push it into place. And that all sounds easy enough, but was actually a four hour project.

So, several thoughts:

1. White Glove service is a really dumb name for a surprisingly difficult activity, like removing a double door freezer from a semi-truck.

2. No matter what store location we ever own, squeezing commercial equipment through doors will never be easy.

3. Our other freezer has problems, so we are just getting to repeat this process.

4. I’m so happy Jason was at West during this, because I probably would have just cried in frustration.

5. The company wants us to pack up the broken freezer and find a way to have it shipped back, but here is my public statement that returning their under warranty broken freezer sounds like a manufacturer problem and not a PJP problem.