Yahoo Finance How to make a living eating pizza
Less than eight years ago Scott Wiener was unhappy in his job as an assistant event planner.
“On the first anniversary of working there someone came up from HR,” Wiener recalls, “and said ‘Oh hey, it’s your first anniversary here. All you need are 24 more years and you can retire.' I heard that and I was like 'I don’t even want one more year.'”
The next day Scott gave two weeks notice with no other plans but to wait and see what happened. What happened was Scott’s Pizza Tours.
Almost every Sunday for the past seven and a half years Wiener has boarded a big yellow school bus with a bunch of pizza fans in tow, showing off some of New York City’s finest pizzerias. It’s a self-made dream job!
“I make a living running tours of pizzerias, writing about pizza, speaking about pizza. Everything is pizza,” Wiener says, “It’s crazy.”
Scott curates his tours to introduce customers to different cooking methods, sauces and cheeses. After they enjoy their slices, Wiener leads them through an in-depth analysis of the pizza before heading to the next stop and the next slice.
In between all that, some other interesting pizza-related topics tend to pop up. Sometimes Scott will talk a lot about dough, sometimes about his Guinness World Record-holding pizza box collection.
Wiener estimates some 35,000 people have participated in more than 2,100 tours to date.
Wiener’s signature Sunday bus tour takes customers to four different pizzerias across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx for $65 (Staten Island is reserved only for Labor Day and Memorial Day when Sunday traffic is light enough to get there and back in time). Scott employs a few select tour guides to help him who run several neighborhood walking tours for $40 dollars.
Earning a living off of pizza doesn’t stop there. Wiener now judges pizza contests and writes for pizza trade magazines as well.
So does Scott want to be the pizza king - holding court over a big company that runs all sorts of pizza tours in several cities? NO WAY!
“I want to be running pizza tours,” he says. “I want to be eating pizza. Every day. I’m in love with what I do and I want to do it every day, and if I can do it like this then there’s no need to blow it up any more.”
What he has done, however, is use the power of pizza for good. Wiener also founded a charity called “Slice Out Hunger” that raises money for the New York City Food Bank. Many of the same pizzerias Wiener visits on his tour gather each fall to sell their pizza for a dollar a slice. The money then goes to the charity. You can find out more about the charity here.
And if you still want more, you can go on one of his tours or help out a recent Kickstarter campaign that is raising money to create a full-length documentary about Scott and his love of all things pizza.
