Now That's A Party!

And that picture doesn't do the party justice. We had a total of 753 Motorcycles pass through throughout the day. My doorman Chuck wanted to set up a "pre Daytona motorcycle rally" to be scheduled for February 23. For those who don't know what that means, well, next week thousands and thousands of bikers head off to Daytona beach for a bike rally. Chuck thought it would be nice to have a party before the party. I thought, a party in February? Outside? It's warmer here than it is in Chicago but still, the average high is under 60. At 10:00 am it started, we had a dozen or so vendors who began setting up at 7 am. Unfortunately it was wet and foggy, not raining but really dreary. By 11:30 we didn't have more than 10 people so I went home. At around 2pm the sun came out and the temperature "soared" to the mid 60's so I decided to go back up. By the time I arrived the parking lot was full of Bikes and pick-ups so I drove around back where there were another 30 or so vehicles. It's the first time ever that we've needed the back to be used for parking.

By 10:30pm I had already gone to the store 4 times for a total of 50 cases of various beers because we had run out of all inventory. Needless to say I was exhausted so I came home and basically passed out by 11pm. When I left we had broken the record for sales by over $300 and customers by over 200. The old record for customers was 499 on my 1 year anniversary last year. We were at 742 when I left, and we were still open for 3 more hours.

I can't take all the credit for this one but I did tell Chuck to go ahead and run with the idea. I wasn't sure if we'd have 10 people or 1000 cause we've never done anything like this before (although every Wednesday night is "Bike night" in the summer so Bikers are used to coming to my place) and what a success it turned out to be!