Worth It

We spent the better part of our holiday weekend making PJP Nifong look less like a hoarding location and more like a pie baking location. If you’ve stopped by our south location in the past few months, then you know the hallway was at critical mass. For most retail locations, fall and holiday merchandise is arriving daily. Plus that location just lacks a lot of extra storage room for the pie tins and pie boxes we buy in large quantity and parse out to both stores as needed. None of that is an excuse and we really just ignored the collection for the summer, but I couldn’t roll into the fall staring that mess down. COULD NOT.

So after wrapping up our baking schedule on Saturday, Jason, Ellery, Jeanne, and I tore into the piles of boxes. (And probably the most important preface to this story is that we rented a large storage unit for $200 a month to replace the missing shipping container that the landlord insisted we remove in June for the painting that still hasn’t happened. Ahem. We are apparently just people who need an extra 10x10 space at all times.)

So we separated out holiday merchandise and hauled all that off to the storage unit. And then we decorated Nifong for fall and put out new fall merchandise, congratulating ourselves on all our cute finds at market. And then we carted off just over 1,000 shipping boxes to the storage unit. Finally we swept up our mess and marveled in the empty hallway.

And then we loaded up our cars with all the fall merchandise for PJP West and drove it over there. That sounds pretty short and sweet, but it took a bit over eight hours to do everything in the above paragraph.

We took Sunday off and then yesterday, Ellery and I circled back to PJP West End and decorated it for fall. We also did a full reset of that store’s merchandise. We also organized the storage closet there, albeit it needed significantly less than Nifong needed. West was designed to have more storage space, but it actually has less and I can’t even explain why.

So that was our holiday weekend. Entrepreneurship is very glamorous, you know? But the hallway is a solid 10/10 and that’s worth it.