When I was in business school, I heard about a business some business school students had started up (at a different school) which sounded somewhat foolish but hey, it was their money and perhaps if they executed well they might make something out of it. That business was campus cookie delivery. In essence, they wanted to open a cookie store, akin to Ms. Fields, only their focus would be on delivery of fresh cookies to college students.
As I say, it seemed like a plausible yet not wildly lucrative idea.
In my life I have basically moved from college town to college town since high school. Back in 2001 we moved out here and promptly began renting, and then bought a house, in a college town. I guess we like the atmosphere. Anyhow, a few years after we moved in, a brand-new eight-store commercial property opened up in Old Town, aka the student ghetto. It promptly filled up with five student eateries, a cell phone store, a barbershop - and Insomnia Cookies.
I don't know if the idea I was exposed to at business school became Insomnia Cookies, but at any rate the business model was now in play.
Well, this seemed just fine for us. We frequently summon food from the various student eateries, and occasionally get the hankering for some chocolate chip cookies. Ten bucks brings you a dozen of them, which is just fine.
In theory.
In practice, this business is the most ludicrously, jaw-droppingly inept business I have ever encountered. Ever. I don't know if it is the Insomnia Cookies chain - as there appear to be a number of others in half a dozen college towns - or just this location. But to insinuate that it was being run by poop-eating monkeys fresh off the boat from Sumatra would be an insult to poop-eating monkeys.
Let me give a few examples.
Several months ago, it was about seven thirty in the evening and we had finished dinner, and decided we could really go for some cookies. I had the Insomnia Cookies flyer, so I gave them a ring.
They weren't open.
Apparently, they wouldn't open until eight p.m.. Because, you know, no one wants cookies before eight p.m.. Note that this place has a storefront and one could, in theory, walk in and purchase cookies during, say, the daytime. And this storefront is in a brand new and did I mention high-rent building.
No matter. I called them at eight fifteen.
I was informed that the oven needed to be warmed up and they would start baking cookies as soon as they could, but that the cookies were not likely to be ready before nine.
For some reason I said that was fine, and to please send us a dozen cookies. Perhaps I was infected by their foolishness over the phone; I don't know. At any rate, I made my order.
Nine rolled around. Then nine thirty. Then nine forty-five.
I called back, in theory to cancel my order. But I was informed that the delivery had "gone out" and I should see it "any time now".
Then ten o'clock.
I should mention at this point that we live perhaps fifteen minutes away from this store on foot. It's a three minute drive.
At ten twenty, there was a knock on the door. It was the cookies. Well, some of them. Apparently a couple of the cookies I mentioned on the phone had been left off the order. No matter, I didn't pay for those.
The guy who delivered the cookies was familiar to me. He had for the prior several years been an employee at the TCBY in the shopping center across the street from where Insomnia Cookies was now, until TCBY could no longer afford the rent and closed down. He is, I think, of some latin American extraction, but his two most prominent characteristics are his bleach blond hair and his black sunglasses, which I have never seen him without. He was wearing them, for instance, at ten twenty at night while delivering my cookies.
If there is any person in College Park I know is consistently stoned, it is this man. Finding him employed by Insomnia Cookies at that point did not surprise me.
The cookies were, to their credit, quite tasty.
We gave up on Insomnia Cookies for a while. They closed down for the summer, but with the return of the school year a little 'Help Wanted' sign went up and their doors were seen to be open again. And, Saturday night, my wife and I decided we could go for some cookies.
First, I went to their website. They had become part of a local food ordering collective, with a website through which one could order from perhaps a score of local eateries.
The website informed me that Insomnia Cookies was open, but that they were unable to process Internet orders at the moment. None of the other nineteen restaurants listed were having any such trouble. Sadly, none of them offered cookies.
Being a website which somehow must have made money on ordering transactions, they did not provide a phone number for the store. However, I dug around and found the Insomnia Cookies flyer, with the phone number, which I called.
It had been disconnected.
Now, I had passed by the storefront only days before, and there had been people in it. And the phone number from the flyer was an 866 number, not a local one. Perhaps their nationwide ordering hadn't worked out for them. So I used the power of the Internet and found their local yellow pages phone number, and gave that a jingle.
It rang, and rang, and rang, and then played for me the dulcet tones of a fax machine.
My wife suggested that we could send them a fax, but no. I knew better. That fax machine had no paper, or if it did then there was a small circle of "employees" sitting around and laughing hysterically at the rare instance whenever a fax inquiring about actually purchasing cookies appears.
How. Does. This. Company. Stay. In. Business?
My wife thinks it's drugs. There is a huge and obvious overlap between people with late-night-specific munchies and people smoking marijuana. She figures you call up the store - with their cell phone number, not publically available - and they deliver some primo bud and perhaps a few cookies. I, unable to come up with any other scenario in which they could continue to pay the rent, can only agree with her. It's gotta be a front.
So if you are in the neighborhood and looking for cookies, you are sadly out of luck. But if you want to score some weed, I know a place you can go...
- Sun Ra