Thursday, July 23, 2009

Now Hiring!

If you haven't become a fan on facebook already, go ahead and look up The Fire Escape on facebook and join! If you are a fan, then you've likely seen the last post that we are looking for trainees for the fall, so that we'll have employees for the spring. We'll go into more detail here, since there are way too many people on facebook:

Starting August 14th [the grand opening!], Shepard will be working regular hours every friday. On the 14th, it'll just be noon to 7, but after that it will be 7:30am to 7pm. That's every friday this semester! What we need is a group of people that can come in to be trained on fridays - obviously not all at once, but if we could get 2 or 3 at most in there with Shepard each friday we could hopefully have a pool of staff members of 4 to 6 people to pull from in the spring, when we're open monday through saturday. You'd basically show up when she needs you to [probably not at 7am the first few weeks, unless we find some morning people in a college town ;) ] and hang out while she works with customers and can go over the normal operations plus closing and opening duties. Then once it gets to around 5pm people will probably start coming in to hang out before 6:22 starts and you can try some stuff on your own. We'd like to have a face to face meeting with anyone who's interested sometime in the next few weeks, so look at your calendars, spread the word to anyone you think might be interested, and if nothing else, show up on the 14th and buy some coffee. :]

Any questions you have can either be left here as comments, e-mailed to shepard.lilley@gmail.com, or left on the 6:22 answering machine at 252-551-5973.

Worshipfest in 15 days!! Get excited!

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

The Fire Escape

I am in the process of realizing a dream I've had since I was 16[click on "coffeehouses" on the left, and then "The Fire Escape"].

When I was 16, I did a research paper on something I had heard Matthew mention before called The Jesus Movement. It was basically hippies in the late 60's who got saved and created a whole new culture of Christianity mixed with the lifestyle of the youth of that day. Amazing! One of the catalysts for spreading the culture was the coffeehouses opened by some of the guys involved, and when I was learning about them, some thing just erupted inside me and I haven't been able to shake it. I've always felt pulled to the culture of that time period anyway, and finding out about this jesus-infused sub-culture just made it better. So I knew that one day I wanted to open my own coffee shop, to be a tribute to The Fire Escape of that day.

Now, thanks to the opening of The Boiler Room, it's happening. If you don't know what The Boiler Room is, check out matthewlilley.com or 622ministries.org - it's cool stuff. Getting that space has opened up an opportunity for so much, and one part of that is me being able to open The Fire Escape to help fund what's going on up there.

When 6:22 starts back up every friday night this fall, The Fire Escape will be open every friday, from 7:30am to 7:00pm [when 6:22 starts]. Our grand opening will be August 14th, the friday after Worshipfest, at Noon. If you come to Worshipfest, I'll have a coffee shop open there an hour before each session, and I'll be handing out flyers for The Fire Escape - each one is good for 50 cents off any drink on the day we open!

When the spring semester at ECU starts in January, we will have regular weekly hours - Monday through Friday, 7:30-6:00, and Saturday 8:00-2:00. That will start January 11th. Hopefully by that point I'll have a couple people hired and maybe another person to help me run it, and it will also give me a few months with the baby when she gets here in September. Pretty excited!

I'll use this blog to post updates as we get things ready to open, possibly put hiring information up, post polls about flavors and ideas, and post any discounts or coupons we put out. So be sure to check back at least every couple weeks! I may not post a ton at first, but it will pick up as it gets closer to opening.