Promises made, promises kept.

We said it would be clunky. Boy, was it. Let’s be honest, the first two days were a train wreck. Excessive wait times, no idea when anything would actually be ready, upset folks.

After two days of not good, I shared the problem with my 14 year old son. He said, “you know, this is a math problem.” We already talked about the area of a pizza, now we have more math?

Yes, yes we do. Lot’s of math in pizza. So here is the word problem:

A pizza joint has 2 ovens. Each oven can only hold 3 pizzas at a time. Each pizza takes 9 minutes to cook, and another minute of putting them in, taking them out, and moving them around in the oven. How many pizzas can you make in an hour?

Let’s assume that you can get all pizzas in the oven at the same moment, they cook in lockstep, and are replaced in lockstep. That is not the way it works, but for our purposes, it makes the math simple. Anyway, you get 3 pizzas per oven, 2 ovens, that’s 6 at a time.

The total cook time is 10 minutes, 9 to cook and 1 to fiddle with it. There are 6, 10 minute periods in an hour. So if you can do 6 pizzas, 6 times an hour, that gives you 36 maximum pizzas in an hour. Now, there will be mishaps (are you really doing anything interesting without the occasional mishap? No, you’re not). So, allowing for the mishap factor, let’s say we get 30 out in an hour. That’s one every 2 minutes, or 15 per half hour.

So there. That’s why we now stage pizzas at no more than 15 per 30 minutes. Working for 4 hours at that rate, we get a total of 120 pizzas a night. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.

That’s our plan going forward. We start taking orders at 4pm. Staged 15 every half hour until sold out.

Thank you Mrs. Beasley for teaching me the math. You were right. It did come in handy— who knew? (Mrs. Beasley knew).

– Chad