A day in the life of Lloyd Squires, Vermont's 'best' bagel maker(burlingtonfreepress.com) |
A day in the life of Lloyd Squires, Vermont's 'best' bagel maker(burlingtonfreepress.com) |
Along these lines, although this seems very tame in comparison, I'm reminded of the "A Day in the Life" chapter from Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential (which I highly recommend):
"Thanks to my Bigfoot training I wake up automatically at five minutes before six. It's still dark, and I lie in bed in the pitch-black for a while, smoking, the day's specials and prep lists already coming together in my head. It's Friday, so the weekend orders will be coming in: twenty-five cases of mesclun, eighteen cases of GPOD 70-count potatoes, four whole forequarters of lamb, two cases of beef tenderloins, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of meat, bones, produce, seafood, dry goods and dairy. I know what's coming, and the general order in which it will probably arrive, so I'm thinking triage -sorting out in my head what gets done first, and by whom, and what gets left until later."
"I've never worked less than 65 hours a week," he says.
He's barely gotten outside of Vermont and Montreal because of the schedule. Now, fortunately, he gets a day off on the weekend. He's recently been to both Connecticut and Boston.
NOOOOPE.
His bakery is also a diner/deli, and I'm going to make the assumption that the revenue from that covers all his non-bagel costs. The ingredients in a bagel cost less than 10 cents each, or about 10% of the selling price. So he could net about $700,000 per year.
Not a bad gig, if he could cut back the hours a bit.
Right.
I genuinely don't get where this glorification of no/ little sleep is coming from.
If the exact same bagels were coming out of wal mart, or out of some glassy office building and made by a robot, I don't think anybody would look at them with the same reverence.
Speaking from personal experience, you can get used to 4-5 hours a night and think you're okay. Starting getting north of 7 and you will notice a difference after a week. (Unless you're a short sleeper, I suppose they just can't sleep that much.)
He needs to hire a delivery driver, record the hockey games on a DVR to watch the next day, and buy blackout curtains for his bedroom, so he can go to sleep by 5 PM.
Everybody who does odd-hours work should have a sleep specialist doctor, and this guy is one of the few who need one, that can actually afford one. Sleep is important. It is not wasted time; it is biologically necessary.
Source: I am such an American Jew, though not from Vermont.
Doubly so for his non-Jewish customers.