The Wells Street Art Fair, and the terrible feeling...
This entire week, we at Coldstone have been preparing for this weekend's 30th Annual Wells Street Art Festival. Every year, Wells Street is closed off from Division (close to where I live) to North Avenue (where the Second City is). There are arts, there are crafts, there are crappy things that are overpriced that people still buy because no one knows good art... and there are food vendors all along the street. As a matter of fact, there's a Jamba Juice right outside Cold Stone's front door. The good news with the Jamba Juice location is that it means we won't have to make smoothies (which are a pain in the ass). The bad news is that there are thousands of people walking up and down Wells... so potentially thousands of customers for Coldstone. We've honestly kept ourselves busy with this all week... making 1500 pre-packaged originals so that people could circumvent the lines and still buy our ice cream (this was my idea... am I brilliant or what?). And there were three or four additional changes made by yours truly on Saturday, to make things so smooth that you felt like you were licking butter when you walked in the door.
The result? $5600 in one day. That number means nothing to you. Okay... this was about what we did in a week in December. Not good enough? Try this: That is the highest single day total in the history of Coldstone Creamery on North Wells in Chicago! They never hit the $5500 mark last year... the highest they got last year was a Saturday (I think it was the art festival) where they did $4100. Yeah... we did $1500 more Saturday than this Coldstone has ever done in one day. I'd like to be modest and say it has little to do with me... but that's not true. In all honesty, if I hadn't been working HARD on this all week, there's no way that we would've been able to absolutely shatter the previous record for daily sales.
But look at me, talking about numbers as if I had no feelings. I'm such a man. What am I feeling, you ask? Well... this stupid festival seems to encompass my entire world... even though it's only roughly 6 city blocks long. It makes me feel so small. I just went on the Euphonics website, and I remembered how being in the Euphonics really made me feel like a rock star. I mean, it's hard to explain... but what I was doing felt like it made a difference, like we were entertaining EVERYONE (because, at Albion, we were entertaining the entire campus). Now what am I doing? I'm performing at the Second City's Skybox stage... for roughly 50 people at a time. It feels so insignificant, and I feel insignificant...