Severe Winds Force Cancellation Of Outdoor Piggly Wiggly Cookout Promotion

WAUKESHA — The Piggly Wiggly on Grand Avenue has postponed its annual "Summer Grill Master" community cookout, originally scheduled for Saturday in the store's south-lot parking area, after store management determined this week's sustained winds made outdoor food service "inadvisable for paper plates." The decision was announced Wednesday afternoon, three days ahead of the event, following a stretch of severe wind and rain that moved through the county Tuesday and Wednesday.

Store manager Linda Oskowski said the call was made after checking an extended forecast that showed gusts continuing into the weekend, and after consulting a wind gauge the store's produce manager keeps in his truck bed for unrelated reasons. "We clocked sustained winds at 28 miles per hour Tuesday afternoon," Oskowski said. "At that speed, a paper plate with a brat and beans on it is no longer a plate. It's a projectile."

The cookout, now in its sixth year, typically draws an estimated 25 to 35 loyalty-card holders and features three contracted food vendors grilling hot dogs and bratwurst under a rented event tent. Oskowski said the store had already printed 400 promotional flyers for Saturday's event, roughly 375 more than the anticipated attendance, a ratio she described as "standard for us at this point."

The Tent Was The Deciding Factor

Oskowski said the final decision hinged less on the food service itself than on the 20-by-20-foot event tent the store rents each year from a party supply company in Pewaukee. "You can grill in wind. People do it in their driveways every weekend," Oskowski said. "What you cannot do is anchor a tent that size in a parking lot with asphalt stakes and trust it to stay put over a crowd. We are not interested in becoming a story about a tent."

"Twenty-eight miles an hour doesn't sound like much until you've watched a folding table go sideways across a parking lot. I've watched that happen. I don't need to watch it happen again."

— Linda Oskowski, store manager, Piggly Wiggly, Grand Avenue

The three contracted food vendors, all previously booked for Saturday, were notified Wednesday morning by phone. Oskowski said two of the three indicated they would be available for a rescheduled date, while the third, a Waukesha-based sausage vendor, said its trailer was already committed to a Labor Day event in Delafield and could not commit to a new date "at this time."

Rescheduling In Progress

Oskowski said the cookout would be rescheduled for "late September or whenever the weather stabilizes," and that the 400 already-printed flyers would be reused with a handwritten date correction taped over the original. "We're not reprinting 400 flyers over a scheduling change," Oskowski said. "That would be a worse use of paper than the wind would have been."

Regular customers reacted to the postponement with what Oskowski described as "mild, appropriate disappointment." A loyalty-card holder who asked to be identified only as Diane, and said she has attended the cookout four of the past five years, said she had already planned her Saturday around it. "I was going to get there right at eleven for the good brats before the corn dogs run out," Diane said. "Now I guess I'll go to Culver's like a normal person."

The store's grocery operations, including its regular meat and produce departments, are not affected by the postponement and remain open on their normal schedule. Oskowski said the Grand Avenue Piggly Wiggly has never canceled the cookout outright in its six-year history, only postponed it, a distinction she said "matters to us internally, even if nobody else is tracking it."