A Very PCC Day
Darrell, our VP of Merchandising, called an all-Merchandising Department meeting so suddenly this morning that I did not have time to notice Cate, the CEO, had just sent out an email to the company informing us of a new store, coming to the Central District . . . within the first half of this year! Holy shit. Her email even included a copy of the official press release, which was clearly being made public at the very same time: the Seattle Times had their own article posted by 9:43 a.m. The time stamp on the email from Cate, which I did not even realize had come until we were halfway through our meeting, was 8:35.
There may yet be more on the Times article by now; when I first found it online, it consisted of four brief paragraphs and ended with the line This story will be updated.
Several things are notable about this store, both in general and for me personally. First off, it's not just the Central District . . . it's 23rd and Union. That's all of 0.7 miles from our condo. It will be easily now the closest store to my home, and it will be open in a matter of months, because it's mostly already constructed for New Seasons, who pulled out. This is a truly rare instance in which we are not waiting for construction schedules (or delays), making it basically the opposite of the Madison Valley store announcement, which originally stated an opening date of 2017 and construction still hasn't even broken ground! (Fucking "Save Madison Valley" dipshits.) I was so excited as far back as 2015 that there would be a PCC barely a mile away from home, and then came the Rainier Square announcement, which effectively nullified the Madison Valley excitement because it was only barely further away from home, but in the opposite direction and in this case all of two blocks off my regular commute each day.
Central District, though, is the biggest game changer yet. Once upon a time I assumed Madison Valley would become my main store for grocery shopping, and it might have yet eventually if it ever opened. Downtown's Grocery department is going to be the smallest co-op wide because of its focus on perishables and to-go Deli meals for the business crowd, which meant I expected that even though it would be nice to have a PCC I could easily pop into a lot more often, our biggest shopping trips would still remain at Greenlake Village, as they have been since that store opened in 2014. (Prior to that, since I started working for PCC in 2002, it had been the Fremont store.) Now, with an 18,000-square-foot store coming to a spot all of 11 blocks away, Central District will no doubt become our new go-to store for grocery shopping. Scott told me this morning that store's Grocery section will probably be slightly larger than Fremont's, even though Fremont as a whole store, at 19,500 square feet, is slightly larger. Perfect! This will save us in both time and gas as well.
Granted, Central District is also in the opposite direction from downtown, but the size of its Grocery section is a key detail in terms of where I'll shop. And, it's still about six blocks (or 0.4 miles) closer to home than Madison Valley will be.
Still, it's pretty extraordinary to me that a year from now there will be two PCC stores within about a mile of me, and god knows when but hopefully soon thereafter, three such stores:
Central District store: 0.7 miles from home
Madison Valley [opening date still completely unknown]: 1.1 miles
Downtown / Rainier Square Tower [this will still be most convenient for quick stops on my commutes]: 1.3 miles
Literally while I was writing this, I just got word from Jean in Store Development that, excluding 987 square feet of loading dock space, the Central District store size will be 17,681 square feet. So, now that will be PCC's fourth-smallest store, at least when it opens; once Downtown opens that one will still be PCC's fourth-smallest, and CD will bump up to 5th-smallest. Either way, it's going to be our 14th store (currently operating), and its opening will have whiplash-inducing turnaround time from its announcement.
This company sure has gotten effective at keeping news of new stores under wraps until it's ready to be public information. This is in striking contrast to the way things were before Cate came along. Although, to be fair, in the 13 years or so that I was here before she was brought on, we only opened stores in two new locations—three if you want to count Greenlake Village, which would have to have been planned mostly before she came along. After Greenlake Village, Central District will be the sixth store we opened in the past five years, although that counts Columbia City which was a replacement for Seward Park a mile away which had to be closed. Anyway, I asked Scott and not even he knew about the Central District store until the announcement this morning. He knew there was another store on the horizon apparently but didn't know much more than that. And as he said, until he sees the press release, there's no reason to bank on any rumors anyway. It makes sense that they keep the details of these things under wraps until the deals are done, because otherwise there's too much of risk of reality winding up radically different from expectations.
They've called an all-office town hall, almost impromptu, for this afternoon, in case anyone has any more questions for Cate. It was nice to get a meeting with Darrell first this morning, though. I appreciated that.
And that's not even the only PCC-related news I already had to tell you about today! I worked the system a little last night: I told Shobhit we were putting several flavors of Tasty Bite Indian Meals and rice packets on clearance, in which case the retail price goes down to just a few cents above cost, starting yesterday—January 6. And we really got a jump on this, because on the first day of clearance pricing, stores still had regular amounts of inventory. Even with the huge number of products we brought, we did not clear out any store of their full inventory. Okay, I take that back. The Jyoti brand of canned Indian foods, which we had never bought before, were also on clearance, and I think we did clean Fremont out of those.
We actually went to four PCC stores within the space of an hour: Ballard (which is an easy bus ride north on the Rapid Ride D bus from the office), Fremont, Greenlake Aurora and Greenlake Village. I had not gone to four stores even in the space of one day since Marianne took me on a tour of all the stores shortly after I was hired in 2002 (we had seven then; the number has since nearly doubled, and will officially double with Central District). Let's go through the numbers of what we brought home!
Tasty Bite Jaipur Vegetables [my favorite, as it contains paneer]: 19 units
Tasty Bite Punjab Eggplant: 11 units
Tasty Bite Basil Chili Rice: 12 units
Tasty Bite Stir Fried Brown Rice: 6 units
Tasty Bite Thai Lime Rice: 6 units
Tasty Bite Tandoori Rice: 6 units
.........................................................................total Tasty Bite products: 60
Jyoti canned Muttar Paneer: 10 units
Jyoti canned Punjabi Chhole: 4 units
Jyoti canned Dal Makhani: 4 units
Joyti canned Delhi Saag: 4 units
..................................................................................total Jyoti products: 22
total combined units: 82
Shobhit has both yesterday and today off of work this week, an extremely rare case of two days off in a row from both his jobs, and yesterday he went to spend time with that older couple he likes to play with. They sent him home with a bag of pistachio nuts and several small onions from their garden. He also stopped by Costco to pick up sponges (yay!) before going to the Ballard PCC to meet me there at 5:00. We were done at Greenlake Village, the fourth store we went to, by about 6:10. I also want to stress that I did not horde all these products that were left! Okay, I did with the Jyoti at one store. But everywhere else and at all four stores with the Tasty Bite, a whole lot was left on the shelves even after we bought all this. And even with this, I thought it was getting a little ridiculous.
I learned this morning that Tasty Bite is transitioning to organic, which is why the change; I added something like 10 new Tasty Bite products to our system yesterday as well. None of them had paneer in them, though, dammit! I emailed Kevin this morning to say I vote for more new flavors that have paneer. Also, when I talked about this mini store tour with Scott and Noah this morning, Noah cracked, "That's insider trading, Matthew!" It kind of is the natural foods version of it, given that I bought all these at clearance price with my 15% staff discount on top of it. One store even added case discounts on two of the Tasty Bite flavors! Shobhit started to say the previous store had not done that and I was like, shut up! They actually aren't supposed to combine case discounts with other discounts. Staff discount, on the other hand, always goes off shelf price, even if it's a promotion or clearance price.
There is one other big upside to having this massive inventory of packaged Indian meals: We can take a bunch of them with us to Australia, and save on several meal costs. Sounds good to me!
We used up two of the Jyoti cans last night, combining it with some other samples that I brought home from work probably three weeks or so ago now: New Origin Foods dosa batter. So we had dosas for dinner, with two flavors of Jyoti, and it was super delicious.
That aside, I was actually really good with my eating yesterday, and I still weighed in at a shocking 159 lbs even this morning. What the fuck! That irritated the shit out of me. Well, at least I've literally gotten the shit out of me—two BMs already today pretty much guarantees it will be down again tomorrow. I'm really hoping to double down on controlling my portions in the new year, and getting my weight under control, and maybe finally shed a few pounds again. Every time I sit on the toilet naked and look down at myself I look like someone squeezed a hairy Pillsbury Dough Boy and I'm sick of it! I mean, somehow I can still get it at the bathhouse, which continues to bemuse me, but I'll take it.
We then watched the Die Hard episode of the Netflix documentary series The Movies That Made Us; the pilot episode of the Netflix series The Witcher (which Ivan messaged me the other day "Drop everything and watch The Witcher!" but he has odd tastes; I have to admit I am intrigued even though Henry Cavill's acting is terrible; Shobhit spent half the time complaining that Henry Cavill wasn't naked); and one episode of season 10 of Cheers.
[posted 12:21 pm]