Hot Dog Stand: The Works prepared me for life in the kitchen

Mondays were meat day.

Chicken sells consistently, so we’ll keep that at 20 pounds. Beef’s been slow; 10 will do. I over-ordered wings last week and we’ve got a case in the freezer, so we’ll skip them entirely. Reservations are declining and rain is predicted for the weekend. Don’t expect much of a rush.

As purchasing manager at a restaurant in Philadelphia, I was tasked with keeping track of inventory, placing our weekly meat and produce orders, and stocking all the other products needed to keep a restaurant running — toilet paper, straws, a new pair of tongs. I hadn’t had any experience in this kind of management, but I’d worked my way up to the job, which fit better with my schedule working full-time in an office, after moonlighting in the kitchen during dinner service.

To find out what had sold early, how to replace them, which dry goods needed replenishment, what equipment was needed, and other details that help keep restaurants running, each week I would meet with our chefs, cooks, servers, and wait staff. I’d place orders with our vendors for the big stuff — meats, onions, potatoes, and the like — and make stops at the local Asian grocers and produce warehouses for specialty goods and herbs, trying my best to transcend language barriers to ask for Southeast Asian herbs I could mostly only identify by sight and smell.

The position was unusual. Every restaurant is organized a little differently, especially when they’re small like ours was, but my gig wasn’t common in the industry — purchasing and inventory are typically handled by the chef, the owner, or a general manager. They are often the same person. I had no authority over staff or service the way a general manager would, and I didn’t cook unless I was filling in on the line. It was a tiny slice of life in restaurant, compared to the rest.

But even though it was my first time professionally managing inventory, I’d trained for it decades earlier in the trailer turned computer lab nestled in the parking lot of my elementary school. My 10-year old self learned how to create a PowerPoint and was guided by an anthropomorphic hotdog who taught him the intricacies of managing a restaurant stand.

Sunburst Communications published this song in 1996. Hot Dog Stand was one of the publisher’s many edutainment games designed to reinforce the fundamentals: typing, phonics, basic math, and the Sisyphean struggle of managing a profitable restaurant. Most of these games weren’t deep, a series of flash cards overlaid with a veneer of entertainment and the thinnest of mechanics. Hot Dog StandIt was the same, however, like all other produce on a given day at a market, you had to make do with what you could get.

The game begins with an introduction from a chatty talking dog who is fond of puns. After that, the toolkit you need to run your hotdog stand will be introduced: a calendar and to-do lists, weather charts and inventory charts, as well as a TV to provide information and updates. The game’s world was unclear — like the murky politics behind the coexistence of Disney’s Pluto and Goofy, you sold hot dogs while under the tutelage of a sentient one — but the mechanics were simple. To predict the crowd size, check the weather reports; buy ingredients according to what each of your suppliers charges that week; determine your menu pricing; then open your business.

It was then up to fates. To my high school self, the details of any rudimentary algorithm that determined your success were a mystery. She believed charging $100 for hot dogs was the smartest business move.

“If you manage your office well, sales will sizzle when you open this stand, and your profits for this season will be tasty,” my hot dog tutor told me each time I visited the stand. My profits were tasteless and my sales didn’t sizzle. My hot dog stand failed because my sales reports were not in line with the target.

In spite of the fact that I was certain of failing, I decided to try a different round. Hot Dog StandWhen I could. The mission was simple and clear. There was a clear mission. The people wanted hot dogs. My hot-dog boss, the talking hot dog guy wanted them to buy hot dogs. And I could help make that happen. These were my motivations in real life. I didn’t have the judgment, sense, or culinary imagination to be a chef, and my front-of-house demeanor needed refining. But a restaurant can’t serve food if there’s no food to cook, and I found my place in the industry with overloaded shopping carts and all-hours texts tracking down fresh cases of banana leaves.

So, I spent my time as purchasing manager (in the most cruel echo of) Hot Dog Stand, our restaurant closed at the outset of the pandemic), I returned once more to the loop I experienced again and again as a child: Check the inventory, keep the restaurant stocked, and hope all of the conditions outside your control — the weather, the weekend’s concert lineup, how the Phillies are doing — make your decisions that week the correct ones. Although I knew it was wrong to recommend hot dogs for a hundred dollars, it proved that the task of predicting how hungry people would be in real life is just as challenging as my virtual one. Every week offered another opportunity to succeed, much like when I started a new computer class.

The computer lab’s edutainment games were more than just a way to get through Excel lessons; they also pointed out fundamental interests that may not have been fully developed until many years later. One budding artist created in Microsoft Paint. A future traveler explored the globe in Carmen Sandiego. With the heart of a shopaholic, my teenage self ordered buns. Hot Dog StandIt was not something she expected to experience again so many years later.

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