Up All Night

Have you ever been in the middle of pulling an all-night study session and suddenly thought to yourself, “You know, I could really go for some warm, freshly-baked cookies right now!” but you didn’t have any in the house? What did you do about it? You can’t very well abandon your work and run down to the market to buy some cookie dough and then cook it; if you had that kind of time you wouldn’t be working all night in the first place. There are companies that bake cookies and sell them from retail outlets, of course, but they’re generally not 24-hour operations, and even if they were, you’d still have the problem of having to leave the isolation of your workspace and go find them. If only there was a business that would deliver such products to you at, say, 1:00 am…

Well, actually, there is. At least, if you live in one of the communities served by Insomnia Cookies , that is. My wife and I were out at the movies this past weekend, and afterwards we decided to go get some dessert. The problem is, there aren’t a lot of late-night places in East Lansing, and most of those aren’t really dessert places. But we both remembered seeing the Insomnia Cookies shop across the street from campus, and we decided to go and check it out. It was quite an experience…

On arriving at the shop, we quickly realized that they were serious about the delivery approach as part of their business model. Part of it was all of the delivery vehicle signs stacked up and ready for use; clearly these people can and do employ multiple delivery vehicles every night – which indicates a relatively high volume of orders, considering that their individual products are not very expensive. Even more to the point, though, was the layout of the shop itself: a small service counter, a tiny seating area (just two tables and four chairs) and a huge kitchen/bakery work space with an equally impressive storage area for both dry and refrigerated ingredients. These people are set up to crank out a huge volume of cookies every night – and then deliver them to the customer…

If you’ve ever worked for a Domino’s franchise – or any other delivery-only food service company – this layout should sound very familiar. It’s not intended to serve in-store customers; they’re planning to bring all of the business to you. It’s the only dessert-only delivery food operation I’ve ever heard of, but what is even more remarkable about the company is their operating hours. They’re called Insomnia Cookies, at least in part, because their target demographic is people who can’t sleep (or aren’t, anyway); they are only open from 4:30 pm to 2:30 pm during the school year, and from 2:00 pm to 10:00 pm over the summer…

I don’t know how well these operations would fare in a normal neighborhood, where people don’t usually stay up all night (and will usually make some attempt to eat healthy food), but in a college town, where people DO stay up all night working on overdue projects and subsist on whatever junk comes to hand, it’s sheer genius. And the odd operating hours not only means the store is open at the most productive times of the day (people other than me don’t eat cookies for breakfast, after all), but also limit the company’s personnel requirements to two six-hour shifts (Open and Close) for the delivery/hourly personnel, and a single ten-hour manager’s shift…

Of course, this will only help you if you are fortunate enough to live near one of their 18 locations, but according to the web site the company is about to start franchise operations, which means that sometime soon there might be a shop in your neighborhood that will deliver some of the best cookies you’ve ever tasted direct to your door in the middle of the night. And if any of you are still looking for a franchise business opportunity with a real difference, you might want to look into this one…