Opening Day---Cubs 5 Cardinals 1

Product---Jumbo Hot Dogs
Temperature--- 40 degrees with 25 mile per hour winds


I’m going to call today ‘Ice Cube’ for three reasons. First, because it was so cold at the park today that I felt like an ice cube. Second, it’s a Friday, the name of the movie series that Cube starred in. And last, as Cube said in his classic song, today was a good day. I sold 187 (on an undercover cop…sorry, wrong West Coast gangsta) jumbo hot dogs, at $3.50 each. That mean’s I sold $654.50 worth of Vienna Beef, and with the commission rate (I don’t really understand this part of the math), I made $74.80. As for tips, if I had to summarize it in less than two words, I would call it ‘spectacular’. It seemed like nobody wanted spare quarters or singles, and very rarely did anyone give me exact change. I started the day with $75 in cash, and walked out of the Friendly Confines with $179 in bills and coins, translating into $104 in tips. To put this into perspective, the most I made in tips a year ago was the Saturday game of the White Sox series, when I pulled in $71.75 in extra dough. So what where the reasons that today was so successful? The most obvious answer is that it’s opening day, a day when people just have to spend money. 2005’s opening day earned me $103.39, a great total, especially since I sold peanuts that day. But I made more in tips today then I did that day. Answer two is that it was against the Cardinals, whose fans usually spend money. But I don’t think that was it either. The reason today was such a profitable day was because it was cold. Not just a bit chilly, but cold. The wind was howling off of the lake, and to warm themselves up, people were buying HOT dogs. There were times when I was selling people two dogs, so that they could eat one a keep the other in their lap to warm their legs up.

Observations:
I only saw two plays in the entire game, but they were both fantastic. In the first inning I’m walking down an aisle in the 300 section along the third base side, and I look up, and see D-Lee crack one through the wind, into the leftfield bleachers. The next was a couple innings later. I’m to the right of home plate, about 15 feet behind the Cardinals dugout. Everyone stands up and starts cheering, vendor translation being that there are two strikes and two outs. I turn around and see Maddux paint the outside corner on a beautiful off-speed pitch. The Cardinal hitter (I didn’t see who it was) never took the bat off his shoulder. He didn’t even look at the ump. After Barrett caught it, he just turned around, knowing he had just been fooled by a future Hall-of-Famer…On the CTA on the way to the game, I overhear a lady (who was about 80) talking about how America would be in better shape if we were a communist country. After she gets off at Bryn Mar, the man who was sitting across the aisle from her yells, “Go Back to Russia.” That’s why I love public transportation…The ATM’s outside of Wrigley must have done great business, because everybody in the stadium seemed to have crisp, new, 20 dollar bills…Funniest quote of the day: Man sitting behind Cardinal bullpen looks at his scorecard about 30 minutes before the game. He looks up at me and comments, “Fuck, Ray King’s not on the team anymore. Who am I gonna taunt now? That man was proof that we evolved from apes.”…I’d say 99% of the people in the world are nice. I would like to thank the gentlemen that scrambled and helped me pick up some of my money that blew away in the wind during the middle of the game.