Moving&shaking

Kreme dreams

“Officially, as the Krispy Kreme brand marketing representative, it is all rumor,” said Mel Windley in a phone interview from Sacramento. But I could almost hear the nice man giddily giggling on the other end of the phone. He hinted that Krispy Kreme wouldn’t announce anything until it had a deal signed on property.

“The Chico and Redding market is definitely on our radar screens,” he said. Even though our population is on the low end of what the company looks for, and is pretty far from the closest Krispy Kreme in Sacramento, Windley said company research, plus the highly successful fund-raisers undertaken by schools here, indicates that either city could support a Krispy Kreme. If one were set up in Redding, for example, the donuts would likely be trucked over to Chico and carried by “wholesale resale partners” like grocery stores—probably Raley’s. “We would service Redding from the Chico market and vice versa,” Windley explained.

He also said that Krispy Kreme doesn’t really compete so much with locally owned donut shops, because most of its customers drive by or pop in for dozens of donuts, as opposed to sitting with one and coffee. Windley said that business even shot up at a mom-and-pop next door to a new Krispy Kreme in Sacramento. “There’s room for all of us,” he promised.

Pop Quizno’s

While I still await confirmation from the companies’ headquarters, I feel extremely confident in saying the re-constructed North Valley Plaza mall will host an Albertson’s, a Starbucks and a Quizno’s. Quizno’s Classic Subs is for sure, I’d say, since J. Deas Enterprises, Inc., last week filed for a fictitious business name for store No. 2675 (weird; there’s only about 1,450 of them). Actually, due to what I assume is a typo over at the county Clerk-Recorder’s Office, they also filed as “Quizno’s Classic Cubs,” which sounds really cute and cuddly, but I’m not sure the health inspector will go for it.

Quizno’s sells sandwiches somewhat similar to what Scholtzky’s used to have downtown before it closed and Subway went in at Second and Main streets. But Quizno’s uses “higher-quality ingredients,” including its own bread and dressing recipes, according to its Web site, where, incidentally, you can find out how to open your own franchise with only $125,000 net worth and $70,000 in liquid assets.

Butte Community Bank is another NVP addition, up for approval at this week’s Architectural Review Board meeting.

All right, already!

Every time I visit ye olde in-laws in Los Angeles (Pacoima, to be specific: Give a shout out to my homies in Pacas), they point out that I occasionally mention my family but have yet to give the Angel family full column status.

I keep telling them, interesting things just seem to happen when I visit my peeps. In fact, my mom and grandma were here a couple of weeks ago for the big Herman’s Hermits event, and we were in the drug store when some couple was unsuccessfully trying to buy three packs of cold tablets—each. “What are they doing?” my mom asked, loudly. “They’re buying ephedrine. To make meth-am-phet-amine,” I replied, just as loudly. Meanwhile, my gram bought bingo daubers.

Anyway, back to the Angels. We went down there two weekends ago for my husband’s twin aunts’ 85th-birthday party. It was really fun. The aunts took hearty swings at a piñata and we ate shredded meat, with real dried chilies, made by Tom’s Cousin Squeaky (they swear he didn’t shoot President Ford). Also present were Tom’s parents, Paul and Connie Angel, their children Stephanie, Alex, Joe, Ana and Anthony (Paul No. 2 couldn’t make it), plus assorted nieces and nephews.

They wouldn’t be so nice to me if they saw what I looked like in second grade (see photo, above).