I'm Starting Early

We stopped by PJP West End today to check in on the construction progress. In exciting news, significant forward progress has been made and the landlord plans to give us possession next Wednesday, September 29th. In less exciting news, that’s six weeks past the original possession date of August 6th. I guess I’m not really surprised - and you probably aren’t either. Construction is never easy and if you add in a global pandemic, then little goes according to plan.

Keen followers of PJP have noticed that we haven’t said much about the annual Roots & Blues festival scheduled for this weekend. We opted out of participating this year because we expected to be on the cusp of opening our second location and thereby short of staff - and emotional bandwidth - to be on site at a festival with a few thousand tarts over the course of the three-day event. This is the first year we’ve not participated in the festival since opening in 2014. I can feel the pull to still panic about all the baking and prep work we would need for this weekend. Obviously we won’t be opening PJP West End next week, but PJP Nifong is so busy that I feel a little relief that the expectation of three 18 hour days isn’t on the horizon. (Though, undoubtedly, we always have the best time at the festival. It is just an admirable amount of work.). All that said, I am low key hopeful that Sheryl Crow will roll through our front door because I really hate for her to miss out on the PJP experience.)

But back to PJP West End. Per our lease agreement, our landlord is finishing out the space to white box status - which is just a fancy term for “landlord does all the big stuff and then we go in and make it look like us”. We will need to build out our dough room, a storage room, the half wall around our baking area, and drywall the office. And then paint it, add the beloved tile wall, and add the decor that makes PJP look like a PJP. Our exterior signage is a month out from completion and our pie display may well be one of the very last elements to arrive.

There’s not a single person involved in this project willing to provide an estimated open date, which I guess is fair. I’m putting my money on early November, which begs the question of what we will do about Thanksgiving. We probably have at least 10 people a week now try to order for Thanksgiving, so when we open orders on October 1st, we need to be pretty certain about our holiday plan for pickup at one store or both stores. Gah.

I was at Chipotle today and It was a little out of control in there…at least by the standards I set for our store. And it made me wonder about Steve Ells and what he is doing today. How did he go from one store to two store to thousands of stores, including one that looks like a mess in Columbia today. How is he fine with it all? How do I have 100 PJPs without one - or all - looking like a mess? How do I open two stores and not mess up Thanksgiving? I don’t expect answers, but just putting out an Internet placeholder so we remember I started thinking about it early.