Views From Above

Thursday. The last picture is our bread bagging station. We still haven't found a better way to bag bread than by hand. Actually, that goes for almost everything we do. It's all done by hand. It's just that with bread you really feel it. When you bag fifty thousand loaves in a month you can't help but notice. These days, a little over a week before Christmas, our warehouse smells like a bakery.

Moon Shot

Wednesday. Yesterday did break Monday's record: we took $293K in sales bookings.  Things have been selling out like crazy. We cleaned out moon pies in no time and have stayed sold out since. I snapped this shot at the bakery during a quiet moment, before our moon pie order onslaught hit.

Seriously

 

Tuesday. Our 11:30 am check-in. Everyone looks serious. That's because we just got news that yesterday was the biggest day for sales bookings we've ever had. Plus this morning we were on the Today show. Matt Lauer ate a palmier and the camera made love to our over the moon pie. That means all kinds of capacity issues to think about. Do we have enough people? Enough boxes? Enough moon pies? The answers were Yes, It Depends, and No. Betty said, "Find me two more hours in the day and I can ship anything."

Biggest day ever. This shot is from Monday night before today's meeting. It was two hours and ten minutes till midnight and we were $32K away from our forecast. We ended up missing forecast by just $1K, coming in at $281K.  As I write it's Tuesday, an hour and a half till midnight. We're already at $276K. Welcome to the new biggest day ever.

Stuck

More than half the boxes leaving our warehouse in December contain a gift box. The gift boxes have stickers that, for the moment, we print in small batches ahead of time. This is the station where they reside. We make our boxes to order so, every time an order goes by—every ten seconds or so—the picker needs to find the right sticker for the box. When you work this station for hours you find your dreams are filled with product codes. 

Snow Day

Sunday. The weather finally came. This is the view through my windshield on the way to the warehouse. As far as weather goes, though, a Sunday snowstorm is just about as good as we can hope for in the mail order business. Nothing is scheduled to be delivered today so UPS can't delay boxes and claim Act of God—an unrefundable offense. 

 

Warehouses are always chilly.

 The view out our service center window.

On Pause

Saturday afternoon—one of those rare spaces during the holiday when the warehouse is almost empty, totally silent. Nothing ships today. This is our sixty foot pick line, completely still. One hundred people will arrive at ten tonight. They'll send a box of food out the door every ten seconds.

A Lot of Coffeecakes

We'll ship something like 14,000 cofffecakes this month. They're stacked up all over the place, ready to depart. This afternoon we got a huge delivery of gingerbread coffeecakes. You can smell the ginger and cloves from outside the building, through the snow.