Orders are selling out in minutes at this Columbia bakery as pandemic closures linger
A side effect of the coronavirus pandemic that has shuttered many people in their homes appears to be a massive sugar rush.
While home baking is seeing a serious popularity boom, a local bakery is seeing quite the boom of its own
Silver Spoon Bake Shop in Columbia is selling out more than 100 orders within minutes each week.
It’s been an unexpected but, ahem, sweet success for bakery owner Erin Nobles since the coronavirus pandemic led her to close her business a month ago.
“I guess I was really naive in the beginning and thought maybe we would be closed for two weeks at most and everything would be back to normal,” said Nobles, who opened the Devine Street bakery in 2013.
As a restaurant, Silver Spoon is still allowed to be open for takeout service in accordance with S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster’s orders closing many non-essential businesses and urging most people to stay home. However, most of the bakery’s employees didn’t feel comfortable continuing to come to work daily out of concern for their own health, Nobles said, so she decided it was best to close.
The bakery opened for the last time March 18. But it had just received a shipment of supplies, including perishable ingredients that Nobles didn’t want to waste, and, well, “I’m just not really good at sitting still,” Nobles said.
Within about week, she had set up her first online store — something many small business owners are learning to do on the fly these days — and opened it up with a limited selection of items for pickup.
“It took about two hours to sell out. People were so mad because they didn’t know about it in time,” Nobles said. “I didn’t realize so many people care this much.”
Since the surprise success of that first round of online orders, Nobles and her small team have continued with roughly once-a-week online sales, with baked goods ready for pickup a couple days later.
Just before Easter, when Silver Spoon’s online store went live at 8 o’clock on a Thursday night, all 120 available orders sold out within five minutes.
“We have maxed out our capacity,” Nobles said. “I never thought it would be like this.”
Boxes of iced sugar cookies (a best-seller in the bakery) or assortments including chocolate chip and ginger molasses are being snatched up so quickly that even Nobles’ close friends are sending her messages trying to find a way to get their hands on them, she said.
Boxes of assorted breakfast goodies including blueberry muffins, coffee cake muffins and pimento cheese biscuits are proving to be most popular in the online store.
It’s all baked fresh the same day the orders are picked up. These flash sales are working out to be about equal to an extra-busy day at the bakery under normal circumstances.
Not everything from the regular cases at Silver Spoon is being sold online, though, as Nobles has had to consider weather conditions for outdoor pickups and the timing constraints of once-a-week baking. That means, for instance, no salted caramel brownies and no specialty croissants for traditional “Croissant Fridays.”
Nobles misses those — although, “I don’t really miss getting up at 3 a.m. to make them,” she said. “But I think I’ll have a new appreciation for that.”
For a busy small business owner, the break from the coronavirus shutdown has actually allowed her some much-needed rest time. And the weekly drive-thru pickups have allowed her more face-to-face time with her customers, which is a treat for the baker who normally spends most of her time in the back of the shop.
“Some people have put in an order every time we’ve done it,” she said. “It’s nice to get to see the same faces.”
Nobles doesn’t bake at home, but she understands why so many people are turning to their ovens as they hunker down in their homes. Sweet treats help keep spirits high.
“It’s just nice to treat yourself,” she said. “In these times when everything is so weird, that’s one thing you can go back to, and it kind of makes you happy.”
This week’s online orders will open up Monday afternoon at 2 p.m., and pickup is on Wednesday.
This story was originally published April 20, 2020 at 10:25 AM.
