Saskatoon pizza shop overwhelmed by orders after heartfelt social media plea

A Saskatoon pizza shop had to shut its doors after a social media post led to an overwhelming number of orders.

“Four o'clock was normal, then by 4:20 everything started hitting real hard, real fast,” Doug Grevna said.

“By 5:00 we were 400 per cent busier than normal.”

The 8th Street Panago location was originally slated to provide pizzas for a family night planned for École St. Matthew School.

However, the event was cancelled following the tragic death of Natasha Fox, a teacher at the school who died in a collision with a cement truck while cycling.

Even though the dough has been prepared for the large order, the shop cancelled it at no charge, given the circumstances.

Moved by the gesture, a parent took to social media asking people to order from the shop so the dough wouldn't spoil.

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“Please consider ordering pizza from Panago on the 8th tonight so that the dough doesn’t spoil and they don’t take a financial hit due to wasted supplies,” the post said.

While Grevna is adamant that he never thought twice about cancelling the order at no cost, he is touched by what happened next.

“It's actually amazing because we just sort of said ... 'no worries,'" Grevna said.

Grevna had made an offhand comment when the cancellation came in that if the school could send a few customers their way it would help the keep the dough from going to waste — but he only expected a handful of orders.

“Then it just got crazy. It was unreal,” he said.

“Our printer never stopped and we couldn't even keep up."

With more and more orders pouring in as the social media post was shared throughout the city, Grevna had to shut the store down temporarily.

"I've never really closed before because we were so busy. But there's no way we could keep up. Our computers only let us go up to 120 minutes for an expected wait time," he said.

"We had to go beyond that. So we just had to kind of shut it down for a bit before we opened again about a hour and a half later.”

He said they doubled the sales of a normal Thursday night.

“The community just came in waves,” he said.

“It was just overwhelming and we're super appreciative."