Blog #189 I talked about the Zappos Buying Team 2003. In this blog I want to talk about why the Weekly Lunch at Zappos was fun

Every week we would have a “Merch meeting” and discus what was going on. Usually it would involve the 6 buyers and a guest or two for lunch. It really depended on what was going on at the time. Sometimes it would be someone from content to discuss new content ideas or what info they needed from the buying group. Other times it might be someone from Finance or Hr to communicate different things.

With all the changes going on we would frequently have new “rules to live by”. I remember finance dropping off a bunch of invoices for the buyers to go over and check for errors. Of course they would have to discuss “How” to do it so they would get invited to lunch to discuss. Another memorable lunch meeting was when HR rolled out the 401k plan. This was important to me because it was part of my negotiations with Fred before I was hired to have a retirement plan in place. 18 years later it has become pretty significant in my retirement plan.

So As I said earlier one of the buyers would be in charge of picking out the restaurant and coordinating for the lunch to either be delivered or picked up. My go to was Venture Frogs. It had the same name as Tony’s VC business but was a restaurant run by Tony’s Father Richard. It was a Pan-Asian style restaurant which I loved. They did an amazing job and the flavors were really tasty. I had so many “favorites” it was sometimes hard to choose which one to get on any given day.

Eileen however had a “food group” you had to choose from and this one didn’t fall into that group. I called Richard up and told him my dilemma. “Can you make a hamburger for her?” I asked. I decided to get one from a different restaurant close by and just pick it up myself.  Most everyone else just rolled with it. The meeting was fun because we all ate lunch together and discussed everything we were working on as well. There were so many things to talk about and we were growing so fast it was pretty exciting.

This was definitely a nice perk, and being in a relatively small office it worked well as we all bonded rather quickly. I would also frequently go to Venture Frogs for lunch on the Non Merch meeting days. I had a few of them that I liked and this was one of my favorites.

Aaron and I would go to Max’s Opera Cafe together but Venture Frogs was my go to. Beside the Pastrami sandwiches at Max’s was an every so often type of thing. In the process Richard and I became friends. He would sit down with me and we would end up talking the whole time. Little did I knew in a few years we would be travelling the world together…