This is about a food at the bottom, so I guess it belongs here, though it feels more like MPSIMS to me.
A long-term friend’s daughter’s business is teetering on the edge. I’ve know her since she was 12. She’s always known what she wants to be. A baker! She started by practically begging her way into a counter job at a little independent bakery when she sixteen, and kept it up thereafter, despite some setbacks, mostly due to family troubles that weren’t her fault at all. She learned about baking, about customer service, about handling staff, about figuring out what customers want, about adjusting for changes in demand, about advertising on a microscopic level, about buying ingredients and gear and ghod knows what all.
She progressed from counter girl to eventually assistant manager, and then when age/ill health pushed the owner to retire, she stepped up, went into major debt (for someone of her resources) and bought the store. Success! Right?
Well, sorta. If you count making a modest living while having to fill in every time an employee let her down and never taking a vacation. But she carried on. The heart of her shop was a particular cookie recipe she developed. Basically a chewy macaroon cookie loaded with coconut, nuts, and dates. I’m not saying this was some major innovation, similar cookies have been baked for centuries, probably, but hers were truly wonderful. Nothing but the best ingredients, and her customers raved. And they sold.
In fact, so well she dreamed of taking it further than just her shop. She contracted with another company, I don’t remember what she called the type of business, but basically they had a full-on factory. They would produce the cookies in larger quantities than she could manage in her shop, using her recipe exactly and their own staff, and package them for commercial sale. (Not just for her, obviously, they made at least a dozen other products for other companies.)
And so she started approaching stores, everything from little bodegas to giant chains, samples in hand. It was slow, but she had some success and the cookies were well received, and she gradually got more outlets.
And then this whole current disaster of an economy struck. She can’t no longer make a profit selling under the terms that had worked. The factory raised their prices … well, who can blame them given inflation, and especially the cost of gas? Delivery costs more. The price of just about every ingredient has gone up.
But what can she do? Raise the final price? But they’re already somewhat of a luxury item. People are trading down a step or two. Maybe that bag of bulk ordinary commercial cookies isn’t any where as delicious, but if it now costs only 1/3 of what she charges? What if her sales drop so much the store won’t even bother carrying them any more?
Or else she could go the ‘enshitification route. Does it really have to be nothing but grade A butter? Maybe fewer pounds of nuts per batch, less dates? But at what point do the cookies stop being special, the very thing that made them worth buying?
And she’s utterly sick about it all. She did nothing wrong, and she’s looking at closing the whole business down. Yeah, she’d still own (maybe) her original bakery, but all her work and dreams and plans…gone.
I hate this so much. She’s a wonderful, hardworking woman who had done everything right – and is still looking at basically failing.
Yeah, I know, Nabisco and such are probably facing scaled up versions of the same thing. But I doubt anyone at Nabisco is weeping into their pillow at night.