Every bakery has their ups and down, but where I work it seems to have more downs. My bakery is more than 100 years old. It is ran by the second generation owners. The owners are almost 80. They do not want to revamp the business even though it is losing money.  All they do is complaint on how they are not making money, that all their problems are employee relates and that it is a product of a bad economy. Well they are wrong! The main problem is them.

They come in to the bakery everyday and just complain about anything and everything! They believe it is everyone else’s fault that the business is doing poorly not theirs!

All the employees have at one time or another tried to help the situation out by giving them ideas about new products or what other places are selling. It all falls or deaf ears. Unless we are part of the family by blood, our ideas do not make it out to the store.  Countless time we have voiced our displeasure to tried and remedy the situation but with no luck.  It just seems like they do not care.

Shaped cakes are fairly simply to make, if you have the right tools. At my bakery we do 2d shaped cakes daily.  We cut the shape out of sheet cakes only. There is basically no limit on what we can make. We first find a picture online of our character. Than we place that picture in our  kopy kake machine, we than trace the outline of the picture onto the cake.  From here, we cut out the shape and ice it. We than go back and trace out the details and fill them in with icing or airbrush color.

Waiting in line at the bakery sucks, especially when the line is long. At my job, we always have a line. Everyone has to wait, even if you preordered your baked goods, even if you paid already. I know it is not a good system but it is the one we have. No, we do not have a different line for ordered goods. No, I cannot help you as I am the decorator putting cakes out for sale. My suggestion is to take a number and wait just like everyone else. Maybe you could complain to management and they would change their line structure, instead of just telling me. My suggestion to you, is to order you goods for early am and than ask the sales girl when is a good time to come in so you do not have to wait in line all day. Lastly, remember that a line in the bakery is good. It shows that are products are worth the wait!

This is a cake I have been getting a lot of orders for lately. I do not know who originally designed it but I do not like it! This cake is  basically made to look like a baby’s bottom with a blanket over it. It would be cute if the rest of the body was with it, but nope it’s just the baby’s bottom.

Along with a bakery we have a coffee house. However you would never know we have both unless you came in both the front and back doors. There are no signs in the bakery mentioning a coffee house on the other side and the same goes for the coffee house. Many people still do not know that our coffee house opened five years ago. We are losing so much potential business due to a lack of advertising each other. My bakery is 3 store fronts, so it is larger than most.

When the bakery first opened we got our coffee from a local coffee producer. However due to the hard economy, his business folded. Since than we have bought coffee from a local supermarket and passed it off as a “specialty coffee”. Our regular coffee drinker can tell and have given their business to other coffee houses. As for the people that do not know, I wonder what they would think if they found out?

Um, what happened here? There seems to be everything wrong with this cake. First let us start with the tiers being different sizes. Why are they like this? There is a silly pattern on top of an unleveled tier. The L and the box design around it are crooked along with the pink line around the base of the cake. I wonder what the customer was thinking when ordering this cake. Why did the order taker not tell the customer her cake would come out looking bad? This cake is the perfect example of a badly designed cake!

Deciding to sell a business is a hard decision to make. It is not just something to decide over night. Most owners think about selling it for months. So why when I asked you if we were gonna close did you not tell me? Why when I told you I saw the listing online did you act like you did not know? Do you think I’m stupid?

You decided that selling the bakery was the right decision for you. I should have been told. I’m a good employee that will stick it out to the end, maybe. I should not have found out one day by having potential buyers walking around! That was just a slap in the face for my years of service to you. Do you not realize that you are going to be putting me out of a job? It would be nice to know that I will be needing to look for a job in a few months.

It’s also nice to be updated on what’s going on.  People come and they go and they come again. Are they buyers? When do you think would be a good time to tell me that the place is sold, when I come into work and the doors are locked one morning? Let me know things in advance so I can plan too. Do I not at least deserve that?

Supplies are necessary to keep a business on track and open. When a business makes a habit of running out of supplies it is usually not a good sign.  The business may not have the money to keep supplies on hand or they may just have a bad manager who does not know how to order the proper amount of supplies.

My business runs out of supplies constantly. In one aspect it is a good thing, it shows that we have a good enough business where everything sells out. On the other hand, it shows that we don’t care enough not to run out. The usual excuse I get when I tell the boss that we ran out of cake boards is that “They cost  a lot of money to buy or that we used more than we normally do”  Both answers are not a good reason, it takes money to make money. If you don’t buy it, we can’t sell  it.  We do a steady amount of business, during our busy times, like holidays and graduations the boss should know to order more stuff. If he do not that is his fault that we ran out of supplies.

Have you ever gone into a bakery and your order was not ready or there was a line out the door? This is one sign of an understaffed bakery. Under staffing is a major problem that has a trickle down effect on everyone involved. Sometimes it’s no ones fault, someone may have called out sick or gotten hurt. Other times it is the fault of the owners or mangers who wanna cut cost to gain more profit.

Under staffing is a major problem for both owners, employees, and customers. Lets start with employees first, they become over worked. Once over worked and tired, employees may not make your product as well as they would have if they were not over worked. The employee may make your product wrong or not give you exactly what you ordered. Than there is the customer, you may get annoyed for having to wait in an extra long line. Than when you get the counter, the bakery may not have what you want or it may be wrong. Finally we have the owners, they may think that their making lots of money for under staffing the bakery. However they may not realized that when employees get tired or mad they take it out on the customer. This in turn leads to unhappy customer which will go else where to buy their baked goods, in turn leading to a loss of business and profits.

A bakery’s website is now the way of the future. If you do not have a website you are living in the past. A website describes your business. A good website will allure people to your business. Your website will basically do the selling for you. Our bakery website  does not do this for our business. All the employees know this but we can not change it. Our owners realize this to but are to lazy to fix it. It is very tiresome and embarrassing to continually tell customers that they must call the bakery to find out prices of our products or come in to see pictures of our work. Our website should have these basic things. It should also have a link to upload pictures and order cakes. We should have wedding cake prices and a order form so people can do their ordering from their home if they choose to. We live in an age of technology where the we should be able to do everything online. So with my bakery not having this, we are behind in the times!

When bakeries close for vacation, everything stops. Workers stop going to work, deliveries stop, and money stops coming in. This is usually the time when bakeries are the slowest. Bakeries close for improvement and sometime just to give the owners sometime off. In my opinion though, bakeries should never close. I understand slow times but if your not open you can not make any money. Also you can possibly lose customers who now have to go somewhere else for their sweet treat of the day. Paying your employees is also money going out with nothing coming in. I believe that every bakery should be able to have employees and owners go on vacation at different time while the bakery is still open and operational. I believe that there is only one reason ever to close and that would be your oven broke down!

Boy am I tired of hearing the phrase “That is not what I ordered, I want it free”. I follow the order form in front of me, if it is not written down I do not do it. Maybe you forgot to tell the sales girl properly what you ordered or maybe you think that if you complain you can get something for free? Yep that is it you want something for free. We know your trick everyone is doing it now. Here it is -

• You place a order for exactly what you want
•  than you come in to pickup your order, you act rushed the whole time
• your order comes out just liked you wanted but you say it is wrong
•  you ask for a manager who offers to fix it for you
•  you say that your late and very unhappy with our bakery
• you say that you will not be coming back
•  you have not paid yet
• so you say I shouldn’t have to pay for something that is not right
•  so you say I should get this for free
•  we do not want to lose business so we give in to your request

Now you walk out happy as a clam with your perfectly made cake that you just got for free.

Why would you want a fake cake when you can have a real one? I charge the same amount for both real and fake. I know that I have to do one less step when making a fake cake but the labor is just as hard. It does not take me any less time when I am decorating a fake cake compared to a real one. So why would I charge less? In fact it might actually cost me more, due to me having to buy materials and work with materials that will not go bad. Also what are you going to do with that 4 tired cake I make you? Do you have room for it in your home? Will you treasure it forever? Do you know that they get incredibly dusty and colors eventually fade? Why would you want to buy one fake cake and than buy sheet cakes to feed your guest? You probably are not even going to buy the sheet cakes from me. You will probably go to the closest or cheapest supermarket and buy subpar sheet cakes and pass them off as mine. This is one great reason that I do not offer fake cakes!

I work for a family business. The parents own the business and all the children work here. They drive everyone nuts when they fight. They talk about each other behind everyone’s back to the employees. When one sibling gets mad at the other they pick on employees.

I should not have to deal with this, I am a employees of the business not a family member. Family fights should be had at home not in the work place. If they disagree with each other over something, why do I have to know about it? You guys are making my job harder than it should be.

Eight people should not all be my direct manager, I should have one. I think you guys need to figure out a way to get along when you are working together. When I have a question and I ask one manager you should not tell me to ignore him/her. It puts me in the middle and leads me to be confused on what to do. Set up a system of order, rank your managers in number order of who I should listen to over others and don’t put me in the middle anymore.

How many times do I have to say  ”Make sure to label that”? Labeling every product is essential to your business. There is nothing worse than not knowing what goo is in this bucket or how old it is.

One day in work I need cream cheese icing, we buy a base and add to it to make it our own. So I asked one of the guys to pull it out of the refrigerator for me. He pulled out the bucket with the original cream cheese label on it, we opened it up to see what was inside. It looked like our cream cheese icing and it had the original label on it, so off I went with it. A few hours later after I had use the “icing” I looked in the bucket only to see some melted cake batter. Now who’s fault was that? Mine, the guy who pulled it out, or the person who put cake batter in the bucket and did not label it. All of us should assume some blame for it, but it mainly fell on the baker who did not label the bucket. If the bucket would have been labeled properly we would have never had an issue.

So now I say, label and date everything that you do. There is no need for preventable mistakes.