i made 1042 cookies in five days. guess how many i sold?
i started a new retail job on top of food servicing this week, so i told myself i'd bake as many cookies as i could each day, which was roughly 200 per night. i worked, got home, took a nap, stayed up to bake, slept, went to work, got home, napped, baked, slept, work, nap, bake...
they told us to anticipate 1000 meals and drinks, so we did. we rented an extra truck, spent the last two weeks handwrapping spring rolls and rangoons, crunched the numbers to brew the teas and afford supplies and recruited four sets of helping hands... one thousand! we'd never known that much business in one day!
at most, i think we sold fifty meals.
and how many cookies?
...
........
............
three.
three.
it was the very first order: two iced coffees and three cookies.
none thereafter.
as orders trickled in, distant drops like water down the rusted gutter outside my window after first rain, i gave each of them cookies too. i loved watching customer's reactions to my saying that i threw them in -- perhaps it was selfish to ruin the surprise of a free sweet treat at the bottom of the bag, but getting to SEE the smiles meant so much to me. the "appreciate you" and the "thank you, wow!" and the "aww, what??" ...
:)
one of my favorite kind of memories is the smile someone smiles when you give them something they're not expecting-- gifts; specifically food. those smiles protected me from the disappointment of three cookie orders.
we tried to boost other sales by dropping prices, giving out free samples, and projecting a graphic on an outside monitor. all of them worked to different degrees! as i wrestled with the laptop to get an updated menu onto the TV, a year-old sticky note, faded blue with scraggly urgency of my normally typelike hand, fluttered to the ground:
"your guys' food is the best. i came in on my day off just to eat."
as traumatic and tiresome as food service can be, it really can be so rewarding.
i wonder if he misses us. i wonder when we'll get to see him again. i hope he's eating good food, i hope i get to tell him how much his remark and enthusiasm meant to us -- so much so that i wrote it down, dated it, and kept it aboard our truck.
so, by the end of the sales period, at least 900 cookies remained.
as is customary when we've got leftover food at an event, i gathered up some bags, stuffed them full of cookies, and circled the vendor's plaza. it's like halloween! i love halloween! i shared piles of my unsold cookies with all the other hardworking food industry folks, grinning behind my mask as we passed them around. one of the vendors gave me a bowl of cajun jambalaya! my mother ate it for dinner tonight. another employee of the same business gave me a rib gleaming with barbecue sauce -- my father has saved it as a treat tomorrow. the lemonade and hot dog stand gave my coworker a free strawberry lemonade. the facepainters were wide-eyed as they raved to me about how delicious the ube sugar cookies i stayed up five nights to make en masse were.
when i got back on the truck, i looked out the window to see almost everyone with the same white paper bags in one hand as they munched on royal purple treats. and even after that, the one of the nine bins of cookies i was drawing from was still half full. another round, then! they were gladly accepted by everyone, so i decided to take the pre-bagged cookies to the fairgrounds.
some people were hesitant at first, thinking we were trying to sell them. i made a point of saying "we're just sharing what we didn't sell" to carry the "free" across.
one man said "ube!" with a smile -- "my people!" that's gonna stick with me.
then a grandmother sat happily in her folding chair and held up her cookies to tell us they were good. she accepted another bag and told me how much she liked them,
a baby held a cookie in one hand and watched an ipad with a case of the same purple,
my coworkers were thrilled by the box i prepared for them to take home,
and i, with my some 800 remaining cookies,
am finally going to get some sleep :)