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For the past eight months or so, PJP has belonged to CrateJoy, an online subscription service.  In short, anyone can log onto CrateJoy and purchase a one-time gift of Jelly Jars or purchase three or six months of recurring Jelly Jar shipments for anyone in the continental United States.  (CrateJoy sells subscription boxes for basically everything that you could possibly think of, not just pies.  Once I noticed that you can subscribe to a box of bird bones to be delivered to your house each month.  BIRD BONES.)  CrateJoy takes a cut of each purchase (plus we pay $39.95 per month to sell on the site), but the service offered in setting up payments on a recurring basis brings a giant value-add to smaller companies that lack the technology to automatically charge someone's credit card each month until the customer cancels the subscription. Our CrateJoy customer base has grown steadily since we've joined, with our biggest growth in the few weeks leading up to last Christmas.  (Which was pretty awesome because the revenue from all those holiday gift purchases was a huge help when it rolled into our bank account in early January.)  And we had gifts and subscriptions of all sorts, from single one-month delivery to pricey one-year memberships to addresses all over the United States.  And in case you are curious, it takes everything in my soul to not include a gift card in each recurring shipment box that reminds the recipient that they are receiving a gift that keeps on giving, Clark.

One of the things that we work diligently on is to send different pies in the shipment each month.  This means that someone (ahem, me) has to figure out which month the recipient is on and what we sent in the last box.  As you can guess, none of those skills are in my wheelhouse.  For example, today we shipped out 12 CrateJoy boxes for subscribers in their second month of membership.  And tomorrow, we will ship out 14 or so CrateJoy boxes for subscribers in their third month of membership.  And a few for subscribers in their fourth month of membership.  And three new signups that will receive their first shipment this week.  So the boxes tomorrow will be different than the boxes today.  And not all the boxes will be the same tomorrow because some on are month three and some are on month four and a few are on month one.  Which is all just to say that our baking schedule for tomorrow is a big ol' mess.  Our standard initial sample box includes:  Dutch Apple, Peach Praline, Cherry, German Chocolate, Chocolate Bourbon Pecan, and Chocolate Chip Cookie.  By the time we progress to month four of the service, I've included Chocolate Chess, Peach Raspberry, and Sour Cream Blueberry.  (Sour Cream Cherry goes in month two, in case you are curious.)

Since no one has magically appeared at my doorstep to volunteer to be my intern and handle this sort of confusing tracking, I may have to resort to desperate measures...confessing to Behind-the-Scenes Jason that I need a spreadsheet or a database or some other type of infographic to figure this all out.  Which, while he will tell me that he told me so, he will be happy to slice and dice and cut the data.  (Those are the technical terms for data, by the way.  Ahem.)

In the interim, I'll probably even include some Old Fashioned Raisin pie just to make sure we are mixing it up.  Which, even so, is way better than a box of bones, right?