A Snickerdoodle Saga

Our Cookies by Mail experiment didn’t end well. Snickerdoodle tells you all about the harrowing experience.

A Crumby Turn of Events

by Snickerdoodle

Sweet cinnamon greetings! My name is Snickerdoodle, and I’m one of two dozen snickerdoodle cookies carefully packaged and shipped via USPS Priority Mail to G.Marie Home Design last week, meant to bring a little sweetness to a watercolor workshop hosted by Gretchin Staples. We were all very excited to meet Gretchin – the woman who inspired our very existence! (We weren’t even on the menu until she came along.)

We were mailed from Tipton, KS, to Manhattan, KS, on Monday, March 16, and Lara Ketter (our creator at Purple Ribbon Cookies) was certain we’d arrive in plenty of time for the workshop on Saturday, March 21. The plan was simple: arrive in two to three days, rest in the freezer to stay fresh, and then thaw out just in time for the workshop guests. What could possibly go wrong?

Here’s how things started to crumble.

✨Monday, March 16: As mentioned, 24 of us snickerdoodles – filled with hope, purpose, and lots of cinnamon – left Tipton at 1:12 pm and rode in a mail truck to Wichita, KS, arriving at 4:47 pm, where we were placed in a distribution center. At this point, we remained calm and optimistic.

✨Tuesday, March 17: We departed Wichita for the next facility and assumed we were heading straight to Manhattan. Sadly, we were wrong.

✨Wednesday, March 18: We were alarmed and panicked when we arrived in Saint Paul, Minnesota, (you read that right) at 9:45 am and were shuttled to several facilities in the area, bouncing around in our plastic packaging and gallantly doing our best to hold together for Gretchin and her guests.

✨Thursday, March 19: We cheered for joy when we arrived in Kansas City, KS, at 2:23 am and left for Manhattan at 2:47 am, an impressive turn-around time, we all agreed.

✨Friday, March 20: We finally made it to Manhattan at 8:50 am and celebrated with collective high-fives, ready to meet our heroine. But as we sat in the facility all day, our hope slowly began to fade. This greatly concerned us, because we were drying out and knew the end was near.

✨Saturday, March 21: Barely hanging on, we heaved a sigh of relief when we were delivered to Gretchin’s post office box at 10:10 am, but her class had already started – AND WE WERE STALE! I’m not ashamed to say that tears would have been shed if we hadn’t been so dry. We totally gave up at this point – sad, defeated, and noticeably less chewy. Even more tragic, we never met the ladies at the watercolor workshop; when Gretchin opened the box later that day, we were thrilled to see her but could only muster a weak wave hello. We knew we were of no use to her anymore.

Oh well. That’s how the cookie crumbles sometimes.

However, not all was lost! We perked up when Gretchin recorded a video of us being unpacked for a Facebook post. It truly warmed our little snickerdoodle hearts.

Lara said she plans to explore other cookie shipping options, but there are a few challenges:

She lives in the absolute middle of nowhere, and there’s no UPS store nearby to drop off packages.

FedEx does pick up at Dollar General (and thankfully, there are plenty of those) but she still needs to investigate.

With warmer weather, she can’t help but picture her cookies (her babies, really) sitting in warehouses, melting or crumbling before they reach their destination.

She’s incredibly particular about quality (borderline obsessive, if we’re being honest) and wants every cookie to taste fresh when it reaches her customers.

In conclusion, the first Purple Ribbon Cookies shipping experiment didn’t quite go as planned, but even from the edge of nowhere in North Central Kansas, there are still other options to explore. We remain cautiously optimistic.

Sincerely,

Snickerdoodle & Friends