OPEN - 7 days a week

Hi everyone and welcome to the very definitely monthly blog, I’m drinking some nice buttery washed Rwanda Fugi on drip from Valor, listening to the artist “Between Friends.” Kinda’ poppy friendly stuff. I saw Anora last night, great movie! Not family appropriate! Gonna’ pretend that’s relevant because Sean Baker directed “The Florida Project” as well, anyways. I’ve had enough of three days off a week, already haha. (see the blog from one month ago where I proclaimed I was done with 80 hour work weeks). I want to stress test our systems and make some extra money this season ahead of my wedding. I also want to put us in a good place to keep these hours for employees after the holidays are over.

This week we opened on Monday! Normally we’re only open Tues-Sun. Let’s talk about it.

When I say we opened I mean I came in and unlocked the door and waited around to see who showed up. I’m talking, coming in at 6:30 when we normally open, didn’t even come in early to get ready. low expectations, low key soft morning. I did in fact scare someone off who was waiting at the door in their car, saw me walking up and drove off haha.

I’m doing a soft launch for the first three weeks mainly to confidently work solo all day, ease in to it and give myself more time to find a baker for sourdough pickup once we make it official. I didn’t even update our google hours. Despite that, we had 21 people come by, maybe 10 of those knew this was happening via word of mouth. The rest just walked on in like it was a normal day. For context we normally see around 60 transactions on a weekday, so three times that.

It reminded me a lot of when we were new, those first few months were mostly me standing around and talking to the same few people for hours at a time. It was cool, I’m way better at making conversation now and holding down a room as one person socially. I could try super hard on every drink, and give everyone a really attentive experience. I know it’s not sustainable though, I’ve gotta get the ball rolling at some point and get a better understanding of how the increased volume affects our systems, then get myself out of here so I’m not working 5 or 6 days a week on bar.

It’s been a long time coming.

This thing happens when we run by on a Monday to drop off milk or water plants or something, people walk in and try to place an order. The lights are off, the chairs are up, I’m wearing flip flops. They’re like “can I get a latte?” It’s incredible. The answer is no, obviously. Where do these people come from? Well it’s not just us, I see people tug on the nail salon doors next door too. Besides the cobbler two doors down, the whole plaza kind of shuts down on Mondays. It goes from dark doors to a more lively atmosphere on Tuesday. So it’s always like seeing a ghost when someone else shows up around here.

Another thing that happens is when we mention Mondays in soft whispers among the team members; People will whip their heads around from all corners of the room to ask if it’s true, the question of “when will you open on Mondays” has become inevitable ever since I started taking time off. I used to say “well I need a day off.” I told a customer we were open on Mondays this week and he said “is this christmas already?” I think word of mouth is going to take some time.

The most frequent occurrence though, is people coming by and saying “I tried to come by on Monday but you were closed” and trying their hardest to psychic brainwave guilt trip us in to opening 7 days a week, sometimes it’s subtle and sometimes it’s not. Now that I’ve heard it 100 times I have some confidence. It really takes a lot of mental fortitude, because It’s more money we could use! I’ve crashed enough by now to know that physical and mental health is more important.

So why now? Honestly.

The condition my fiancé set was “you need two days off a week.” Until now I was sort of waiting for one employee to take Mondays that I could trust, but the two problems with that were me having to cover if they were sick or gone, and that now we generally need two employees on every weekday. So then it became needing two good employees and enough hours to go around. Now I have three employees, and three days off.

Beyond just being gone on paper, I wanted to feel like the shop could exist if I was gone. Right now my two essential tasks are paying bills and grocery shopping, but the other tasks are handled by employees as much as they are me, not including minor upkeep like fixing shelves or changing water filters.

So what changes if we add an extra day? All the systems in some way I think. I’ve began working on that. My first priority is updating our cleaning guides to have auxiliary supplemental material. Like, longer explanations on how I want things done. From there I’m going to review it all.

I hope this all goes smoothly and by January I can take some time off. I’ve got confidence in our team and I feel pretty good about it all in general. I’m excited to update our hours and get some feedback : )

thanks for reading - Eli