If the exact same bagels were coming out of wal mart, or out of some glassy office building and made by a robot, I don't think anybody would look at them with the same reverence.
Speaking from personal experience, you can get used to 4-5 hours a night and think you're okay. Starting getting north of 7 and you will notice a difference after a week. (Unless you're a short sleeper, I suppose they just can't sleep that much.)
He needs to hire a delivery driver, record the hockey games on a DVR to watch the next day, and buy blackout curtains for his bedroom, so he can go to sleep by 5 PM.
His bakery is also a diner/deli, and I'm going to make the assumption that the revenue from that covers all his non-bagel costs. The ingredients in a bagel cost less than 10 cents each, or about 10% of the selling price. So he could net about $700,000 per year.
Not a bad gig, if he could cut back the hours a bit.
Right.
I genuinely don't get where this glorification of no/ little sleep is coming from.
"I've never worked less than 65 hours a week," he says.
He's barely gotten outside of Vermont and Montreal because of the schedule. Now, fortunately, he gets a day off on the weekend. He's recently been to both Connecticut and Boston.
NOOOOPE.
Along these lines, although this seems very tame in comparison, I'm reminded of the "A Day in the Life" chapter from Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential (which I highly recommend):
"Thanks to my Bigfoot training I wake up automatically at five minutes before six. It's still dark, and I lie in bed in the pitch-black for a while, smoking, the day's specials and prep lists already coming together in my head. It's Friday, so the weekend orders will be coming in: twenty-five cases of mesclun, eighteen cases of GPOD 70-count potatoes, four whole forequarters of lamb, two cases of beef tenderloins, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of meat, bones, produce, seafood, dry goods and dairy. I know what's coming, and the general order in which it will probably arrive, so I'm thinking triage -sorting out in my head what gets done first, and by whom, and what gets left until later."
