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Requiem for a Donut
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Josh Millard RJ: Tex Corman CO: J. Quaff Arabica Post Rating: 21 + / - Total Posts: 167 Karma: 231 Joined: Apr 3, 2012 |
Posted on May 11, 2012 Tex Corman once had a donut. An unusually high quality donut. A donut with more nines even than the rest of the unusually high quality toilet tanks and airplane wings and barley husks in the world. A four nines donut. Q9999. A glowing donut, forged at the anvil of Ratan's private blacksmith-slash-baker himself, in the strange darkling days before the great three-nines Five Hundred Player Engiftening.It was a thank you gift. Corman didn't ask for it; he never set out to get it; but it was given and he was delighted to have it. And he kept it behind glass on the shelf of his first Giant Donut Cafe, because there was nowhere else to keep it. And he made lesser donuts -- fine donuts, donuts Econosians loved to eat, but not four-nines donuts. He made merely great donuts and he sold them, by the thousands and then the ten thousands and then the millions. Giant Donut Incorporated grew from an upstart corner cafe to a household name, one of Econosia's largest outlets of fine baked goods, coffee beverages, and misc. cafe goods. Billions were made. Yachts were purchased. Taxes were massaged. But the special donut stayed right there, behind the counter of that first cafe. Millions of merely excellent donuts sold for six, five, even four dollars a piece, but that Q9999 marvel sat, pristine and untouchable, behind a small hand-lettered sign which read "NOT FOR SALE". Customers would drop by the flagship store and gawk at it's odd glow, wave to it, nod meaningfully to one another about it. "That's some donut", they'd say, or "it's terrific!", or "so radiant!" "And humble," a sage old-timer would intone over the brim of his GDI Cappuchievement Fuel now and then. Once or twice a young clerk nearly put the donut up for sale. Nearly a disaster. Tex Corman himself began taking time away from his yacht collection to visit GD Cafes quarterly just to hold employee education sessions underscoring the importance that that never happen, that the donut stay off the market. "N.B.S.", he'd say, tapping one word after another on a chalkboard. "Never. Be. Selling." And "P.T.D.D. Put That Donut Down. Donuts are for Cormans." And so it went. The donut, the Q9999 marvel, always in the store, never for sale, standing out like a sore but magnificent thumb. Conspicuous, in a retail chain where sales were job one, as the one thing that would never be selling. The keystone in a retail empire. "But why," one young employee asked during a quarterly donut-education meeting. (Most of GDI's employees were young; Tex Corman had spent many millions of his private profits creating a job-education cooperative program for high school and college-age Econosians.) "Why not sell it? People would love to buy a donut like that!" Corman had smiled sadly and said it was "not an option, period." What he didn't say was that he'd love to sell them a donut like that. What he didn't say was that the problem was there's only one. That it'd do terrible things to his customers, to be presented with an option like that, a fight for something so glorious, so rare, so universally beloved. It'd make Wal*Mart stampedes look like pillow fights, world wars look like world wrestling entertainment. The donut was dangerous: to his customers, to Econosia, to GDI. Behind glass, with its cleanly lettered "NOT FOR SALE" sign, was the only safe place in the world for the donut or for anyone else. Sometimes, at night, Corman would lay on his Slumber Yacht and talk to the stars. "Stars," he'd say, "I wish I could sell the world the best donuts it ever tasted. The Q9999 donuts. By gum, that'd be the best breakfast Econosia ever ate." But that'd take a miracle. Corman believed in hard work, and it had made him a billionaire many times over, but miracles he couldn't quite figure the financials on. But one morning, he dropped into GDI's flagship store, Giant Donut Cafe West, for a morning cup of fuel before the latest quarterly education session, and everything was wrong. The store was a mess. The staff were shellshocked. Customers wandered in a daze from one shelf to another. Great piles of twenties and fifties and hundreds were filling the back corners of the store like snow drifts, great cascades of cash trying to spill out from the stock room. And the donut was gone. Corman stood in silence, and the store stood with him. "Sir," a nervous high school junior finally squeaked; he stood behind the counter, with his nametag that read "Wilbur" and his paper hat with GDI's man-eating-a-giant-donut logo printed on the sides. His voice cracking, he continued: "Sir, it was...it was a miracle. I think." And then the young man passed out. Later, recovering in Emergency Room B of Corman's Medical Yacht, the shaken Wilbur told the whole story. Late that night, during the graveyard shift, there had been a sudden great blinding light and a musical noise "like that classical stuff that old people listen to, but, like, more so", and suddenly the donuts began to glow. All of them. The light was so bright the staff had to don their (complimentary Corman Industries butts lol fashions brand) sunglasses; customers began screaming, clamoring for the right to purchase a dozen, a hundred, a thousand of these amazing donuts, waving hundred dollar bills in the air in what could only be considered a stunningly hard shove from the invisible hand of the market. For the next two and a half hours, GD Cafes sold millions of donuts to insatiable customers, every donut magnificent, every donut a Q9999. And then it was over, the glow faded, and the donuts still in stock returned to being merely excellent, merely two-digit quality. And the sun came up on a chain of stores that would never be the same. GDI's already steady eight-digit daily revenue was dwarfed, in one evening, by one and a half billion dollars in sales, as every man, woman and child in Econosia finally got their wish: a Q9999 donut of their own. Miracle. Corman, meditating on the bow of his Thinking Yacht, couldn't think of a better word for it, except one: tragedy. What was an extra billion dollars to a billionaire? It wasn't a donut. He'd had a donut, once, and now it was gone. And he'd give it all back just to see that Q9999 donut again. |
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Andrew Wiggen RJ: Andrew Wiggen CO: stessier Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 16 Karma: 48 Joined: Apr 5, 2012 |
Posted on May 11, 2012 Brilliant!
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Herb Derpman RJ: Herb Derpman CO: Herb Derpman Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 35 Karma: 28 Joined: Apr 15, 2012 |
Posted on May 11, 2012 I had a Q9999 donut as well, and also ended up with millions of them in stock last night. Except I didn't sell mine. :-P Certainly noticed you doing so, though.
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Scott (Admin) RJ: Ratan Joyce CO: Ratan Joyce Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 1175 Karma: 5083 Joined: Jan 13, 2012 |
Posted on May 11, 2012 Brilliant indeed, perhaps that's the meaning of life. :-)
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Josh Millard RJ: Tex Corman CO: J. Quaff Arabica Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 167 Karma: 231 Joined: Apr 3, 2012 |
Posted on May 11, 2012 The damnable fiddly bit is I didn't even decide to sell it; it was sitting there, not-being-sold in my cafe inventory because you can't not have a product show up in the shelf if it's in your warehouse but you can at least set it to paused selling.But then the inventory squashing happened, and apparently there was about ten ticks where the process of averaging my stock together happened but didn't happen completely, and so I was by whatever weird quirk effectively selling giant piles and piles (like, hundreds of thousands per tick) of Q9999 donuts at four hundred bucks or so a pop (whatever the Lazy 2X button assigned to it the one time I clicked that button). Really stark shelf when it started and then stopped. Just absolute sheer cliff of sales figures, up and then back down again. Which has had the effect of temporarily saturating the hell out of the donut market and making the product sales and research stats totally non-sensical, though I imagine that'll settle down after a day or two. |
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martin uzz RJ: Martinuzz CO: martinuzz Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 59 Karma: 20 Joined: Apr 16, 2012 |
Posted on May 11, 2012 I already wondered why earlier today, the sales pages for donuts told me that average world selling price was over 200 bucks.Awesome story there btw |
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