Some of you may know, many of you don’t, and many of you may have only today to find out, more on that later. This Monday was my last day in the popcorn business. Hopefully if you are a friend and reading this you at the least somewhat knew that I was in the popcorn business for the past three years of my life. I am writing this post to help catch up some people about the last three years of my life and what I plan on doing from here on out. The interesting thing about this is all it will be is a link on Facebook to my blog and we all know how well that has turned out with convincing you to not only like the Facebook page but to get people to just head to the blog. Either way the jokes about the business being ‘popping’ are over and I am actually sad that they are though extremely tired of them.
Three years ago in the winter my dad left his job at another local popcorn company and with a group of supposed marketing execs started Gourmet Delights. During the formation I decided to go into the venture with my dad and threw in my whole savings into it. During the early days I was not around a lot until the summer when I decided to help full time. Over the next year I would acquire distribution with the inner city Walgreens consisting of stores in the loop and surrounding areas & neighborhoods of Chicago. Soon after due to that success we had our distribution picked up by Vitners. Times were good early on but of course soon began to fall apart. I am not going to go into detail of what happened because I have gone over it too many times in my head and with people. It was a slow fall though. It wasn’t until this passed December that it became clear that it was going to be over. We were out of money.
Our lender thankfully swept in and through the ashes of Gourmet Delights in January Chicago Gold Snacks was born. I was no longer a partner of the company. I had lost my investment, as many did, but I stuck around because I still believed in what we did and this time the picture just looked a lot better. We had things figured out for the most part but we were still crawling really for the first time instead of just running out the gate. Lots of early costs for formation and rebranding ate up much of our starting capitol and it wasn’t until the late spring when we started to achieve the proper profit margin needed by the company. By that time it was still too late again. Cashed was used up. This it was going to be even harder to get more money. It was time to finally take that long hard look and decide on what needed to be done. We had to say goodbye.
Over the last month Chicago Gold Snacks and its main product Chicago Gold Popcorn was looking for a buyer. If anything not to lose something that we had spent so long being built. Also in some way to find somewhere for my dad to continue with instead of just having to go back to the hall. I knew my time was done. Since the day that I realized it was over I just felt like I was finally finished with popcorn. With no guarantees from companies to stay on beyond an initial transition I knew my time was up. I stuck around took care of the taxes. Smiled when new people walked through the door to take a look around. I made sure to listen to every offer though at the very least for my dad and what exactly they would be doing with the company. Many of the people who came through were a lot of our competitors acting like that had slayed the giant and coming to pick off pieces of meat from the bone. It wasn’t until recently that we finally came across a buyer who was actually interested in taking on everything, even the brand. Taylor’s Candy signed the papers and took over this passed Monday forming Windy City Gold Popcorn. I said goodbye to the warehouse for the last time at 3pm and walked out with my boxes full of all the electronics I had brought over the years.
This article was meant to be written that Monday afternoon to be published Tuesday morning. Since I left that afternoon I just have not had the conviction to really sit down and write this. To really have to go through, at least in my mind, the past three years of what I have done. In no way am I doing this to justify that I did something with my life for the past three years. I guess I just want to tell a micro story to those I haven’t been able to keep up with as much as I would like due to this job. It really was a personal part of me and its been hard to let go. Over 12 hours a day for very little money but at the same time probably one of the most fulfilling things I will ever do. The past couple of days have really just been spent doing some cleaning. Maintenance and decision making. While I work on my resume and apply for a new path in my life I am going to be writing a lot more on pop culture with a somewhat focus on Chicago in this blog. Thats why I made this one. I would like to encourage anyone who finds themselves too busy to scan over their entire RSS to come here and read some articles and catch up on whatever news I decide to post for the day.
I will be writing a lot more. It is something I enjoy doing as some of you know. This will be my main source of it for now as well. I am also taking a que from a friend and will be using Facebook a lot less. That is not to say that I am going to be removing myself from the rest of the social network sphere. Just honing them in to be more centered towards my blog. My twitter will now just be a path to my articles that I write and photos I take with my phone. My tumblr will pretty much just stay the same but under a new name and probably contain some of those said pictures appearing on twitter as well. I will really be making my main for of communication on Facebook through my blogs page which is why I have been trying to encourage more to Like it. Because after 24 hours of this post being up I will basically being Avada Kedavra’ing a lot of people off my Facebook friends lists. If you still want to have some sort of contact with me than I more than encourage you to find me on Google+ and for you to follow my writing if not on my blog than by liking the Facebook page to receive my articles in your feed.
For those of you who have been there for me the past three years I can not thank you enough for your support in this crazy journey of mine. I hope you will continue to follow me on my adventures in writing now and keep challenging me with new themes and stories to write about. I also apologize deeply to those friends I let fall by the waste side in that time period as well. In no way did it mean that I valued our friendship any less I just blame myself for not managing my time better.
Forever InDa ChicagoMix,
Eric.
