Thanksgiving started off as any other day. I got up early, started baking (bacon, chocolate, peanut butter cookies which were AMAZING) and went to lunch with Samantha and Thomas. We kept it classy and went to IHOP for our Thanksgiving meal. I came home to finish baking cookies thinking I'd have a few hours to relax before going into work at 6pm. Around 2 I got a call from my boss in which she said "Do you want the short story or the long story?". She filled me in on the total power loss we'd had at the store that morning. Basically a squirrel jumped in between two phase units and shut our power off between 8 and 9 that morning. Our backup generators couldn't power the whole store before they could get the power on so we lost all our food. Anything not in a freezer became trash and when the power blew the Fetco machine in Starbucks shorted out.
So when I got to work at 6 all the cooler cases were covered in tarps. We had to quickly clear out the Deli and Bakery cases and while doing this I suddenly realized that no power meant no milk, no creamer, no pizzas, so no Starbucks and no Cafe. We called a store up the road who offered us some of their milk and Daniel set off to pick this up. While all of this was happening the line was quickly growing around our store. After Daniel arrived with the milk I broke the bad news to the food team coming in that night and had to go outside to start crowd control.
The crowd control and store opening part of Black Friday was really fun. We passed out maps and talked to the crowd as they lined up and then at 9pm let everyone in. It went really smoothly, we probably had about 2500 in line and another crowd gathering as we opened the doors. I only had to get crunk with one or two people and for the most part people thanked us and high fived us as they went it.
It was pretty crazy for about 2 1/2 hours and stayed steady till around 1am. About 11:00 our espresso machine in Starbucks also went down and around 11:15 we started processing the food loss. For losses greater than $2500 the company takes the loss so we had to count and scan everything on the sales floor and everything in the cooler (including the truck we had just received the previous night). Everything was finally scanned out and tossed around 5:15 this evening. I was kicked out of work at 10:30 this morning after almost 17 hours there. I'd been up for over 24 hours and was pretty much living on red bull. When I left we'd emptied the entire sales floor of Deli, Produce, Meat and the Dairy wall. We'd also cleared the coolers in Cafe, Deli, and Meat and half of Dairy. All in all our loss was $98k in food. All because of a squirrel.
A pound of bacon!
The cookies. So so good! Pretty much a perfect Black Friday treat
Just a sample of the food we pulled. We had 6 of the cages going back and forth as well as a few pallets, 5 tubs, a few flats, and 6 QMOS cans.
The aftermath of Foodpocalypse 2012. All the liquid leaking out of our stuffed full compactor.
