A day in the life of Lloyd Squires, Vermont's 'best' bagel maker
burlingtonfreepress.comI love portraits like this, as the lifestyle is so far from anything I experience in my day to day.
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."
Awesome seeing Vermont on the front page of HN. I can attest these bagels are amazing, I used to get them throughout college.
I’ll be in Burlington for thanksgiving, can’t wait to try them!
I heard about a mayor from there at one time, nobody's ever heard of him because they were too busy showing empty podiums. ;)
He then worked 15-hour days, seven days a week for seven years.
"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.
But look where he was coming from: he was homeless before. He has purpose now, and is engaged. Yes, it's unbalanced - and i would surely burn out from it. But he seems happy, and grateful for what he has. Satisfaction in life comes in many shapes and sizes.
He makes/sells on average 250 to 300 dozen bagels per day. The bagels sell for $10 a dozen, so that's over $2500 revenue on the bagels alone. He's open 6 days a week, so that's $15,000 per week, or $780,000 per year.
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.
Still, 15 hours of manual labor a day. I worked in a bakery and this is a hard sell for anyone. Assembly line work in a factory is much easier occupation (I did that too).
He arrived at work at 2:11am, and he left at 10:31am. So that's a typical 8 hour work day. He then set off on a long road trip to deliver bagels, but he could easily get somebody else to do that -- he just likes the drive.
24 hour donut shops: I've seen them baking all night and morning. It's a rough business.
> He rarely gets four hours of sleep.
Right.
I genuinely don't get where this glorification of no/ little sleep is coming from.
Is this glorification? It seems like they're just stating a fact. It's mentioned right before that he wakes up every day without an alarm, so this is part of his routine.
He should close Saturday, and get a hechsher. He’d get more business and some rest.
> Saturday, and there will be twice as many customers
Yes, but being open Saturday, he won't have Jewish customers, who are in the prime demographic group for bagels.
He won't have the Orthodox Shabbat-observing hechsher-seeking Jews. Most American Jews, and I suspect most Vermont Jews, are quite open to buying a bagel on Saturdays, or from a bagel shop that isn't strictly kosher.
Source: I am such an American Jew, though not from Vermont.
Doubly so for his non-Jewish customers.
Except, ya know, the twice as many customers he mentioned he gets on Saturday.
The Montreal spice bagels here are very good! It's the perfect weekend morning spot located in an old warehouse that has a vintage furniture store on one side and a used record/book store on the other. After I'm finished with my bagel and coffee, I love taking time to explore the other shops. They always have weird and interesting stuff.
When I think I am working hard, I watch folks like this, and I know I have it easy.
I've been to this bagel shop multiple times and I can attest that it's good. It's in a pretty rundown building with an unpaved parking lot. It just goes to show that quality is not always about aesthetics.
That unpaved parking lot and rundown building are part of the aesthetic, and probably part of what makes the shop so appealing.
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.
I live in Burlington VT and they are the best bagels I've ever had. (Of course, I have not tried everywhere but they are darned good.)
But the bagels are aesthetically pleasing.
Dude can throw them with baseball accuracy. He's no doubt skilled but I also think the idiosyncrasies of his mastery through years of experience gives the bagels their own quality but also a quirky aesthetic.
They look really skinny compared to a New York bagel.
They are. It's a different thing, but they're great.
The gifs in here are a treasure trove for r/oddlysatisfying
How can he sustain this 5 hour sleep schedule?
Some people actually are short-sleepers naturally. He might be one of them. Or he might just be perpetually exhausted to the point where he's learned to "function" on less sleep.
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.)
Some do get by on very little sleep and claim to be able to functionally do so. However, there is a growing body of evidence to indicate that this has serious long term health effects and may contribute to dimentia later in life.
He can't, unless he has a beneficial genetic mutation that makes his sleep super effective.
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.
ah, the arrogance of HN hard at work. Prescribing the perfect solution to a problem he didn’t even know he had.
Fine. He should get a sleep study done, so a specialist doctor can describe the damage he is doing to himself, scare him a little, and come up with a treatment plan from there. If you only sleep for 4 or 5 hours a night, you are killing yourself.
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.
The Montreal bagel is no joke.