None of that is being used for these cakes. See my above post.
However, YOU don’t own this conveyor and robot and all of the rest. If YOU want to make the cake, YOU have to make the frosting, fill the bag, put on two layers of frosting, pipe the trim, write the words, and then clean up and do the dishes. YOUR cost of making the cake includes all of these tasks, even if theirs doesn’t. (But they have to pay for the machines and the technicians to maintain them.)
You forgot about licenses, permits, next of kin notification, mafia payoffs, and the difficulty of baking the girl inside! :rolleyes:
Thank Zod I didn’t ask about 4th of July Herritage Loaf. That probably costs 5 grand at the Pick-n-Flick.
Hell, I do bake a lot and have brownie pans, different sizes of cupcake pans,cookie sheets ,springform pans , a mixer with a dough hook and a grinder attachment and even the metal rods used to fry cannoli shells. But some of the things I don’t have include rectangular cake pans and the decorating stuff. Know why? Because I can’t decorate a cake without it looking like some uncoordinated three year old did it.
You’re doing it again, you’re making things up. You might be right, I’ll give you that, but find a cake factory and see how many people it employs before you say ‘not many’. You mentioned that there used to be one around here, I’m not sure which place you were referring to, but maybe you can see how many employees they had.
Near the beginning of this thread I gave you some wholesale cake prices. One of those cakes came from a place called Cakerie. I did some poking around and found that a few years ago they opened a new plant in London. Based on this article, the new plant had 70 employees, working one shift, getting paid $14/hr and cranking out 3500 cakes per day. That works out to $2.24/cake (not counting the employer’s portion of payroll taxes). But that’s not what this is about, this is about you assuming there’s ‘not many’ employees in charge of the machines. I’m not even sure what you mean by that. Their main plant in Canada has 400 employees.
Cite
Watch just about any episode of Modern Marvels or How It’s Made or Dirty Jobs or any other show that takes you inside a factory and you’ll note that it’s not just 4 employees hanging out in the break room waiting for a machine to need help with something.
This whole subject is one that really gets to me. Day in and day out I get people assuming a lot of things about it just like you probably get people assuming a lot of things about your job. One day I was delivering a lunch to someone that was making a presentation. She made the comment that she was thinking about getting into catering because ‘it just looks so easy and look at all this food getting delivered here, there’s sooo much money in it’. I remember saying something along the lines of 'the slicer I used to slice the meat on your sandwiches was almost three thousand dollars and I just replaced a $250 part on it" her eyes got big when I said that, then I went on to say “your order is about $200 I think, that means the owner is going to put, maybe, $10 in his pocket and he’s been at work since 5 in the morning”. I think she was just another person who thought the owner was going to take that $200 and make a boat payment with it.
You know, knowing how few people want to / can bake a cake from scratch including making frosting, all of this recreational outrage over the price of cake reminds me of the old joke about the plumber.
A lady had a leaky faucet and called the plumber over. He proceeds to change the washer and bills her $50 for the repair. She glares at him and says, “I saw you just replace a rubber washer that didn’t cost more than a dime.” The plumber takes the bill, writes some stuff on it and gives back to her. She reads: One washer $0.10; Knowing where to put it $49.90.
Click and Clack (Car Talk) get calls like that sometimes. I remember one where the caller asked why his local garage quoted him at something like $100 for the part and $700 for the labor. When they asked what the job was, it was the rear main seal on the transmission. C&C explained that the part was cheap, yes, but it’s a HUGE amount of labor to get to it since the transmission has to be removed.
They went on to say that whenever the labor is more than the parts people get annoyed but if (in this case) the part was $700 and the labor $100 the guy would have paid without even thinking about it (to which he agreed).
Which brings us back to two things. 1)People don’t like paying for labor, especially if it’s something they feel they can do themselves (great, so do it yourself) and 2)People don’t like paying someone more than they feel the item costs that person. Again, great, then go attempt to buy it at my cost somewhere else.
Often times people will ask how much we charge for delivery of a certain item. I’ll say ‘If it’s in Milwaukee County, it’s $10’ and they’ll say 'but it’s only xx miles/minutes from you and you’re charging me $10!?" My usual response is to very nicely say ‘if you want, I can have it ready for you and you can come and pick it up and deliver it yourself’ but, oddly, they never want to. Funny, they don’t want to do it, they just want me to do it for free.
… and then we can get started on the tens of millions of dollars that it cost to buy/lease the land and build the factory and install all the machinery.
5, it was 5 tens of millions to buy (build?) the plant.
Hmmm, so let’s be generous and assume that includes land cost though it’s probably just build cost. 3500 cakes a day lets assume 365 days a year and that the plant has about a ten year lifespan before you have to refurbish etc.
That adds about another $4 per cake, I think. We are now up to $6.24 per cake before we get to ingredients, power, management, marketing, transport etc.
**Anybody **can make a cake. The directions are on the box. They even have pictures for people that can’t read. How can anyone screw up adding oil and 3 eggs? A $15 hand mixer is the only tool needed.
A 8 year old kid can follow these directions. I’m not baker but I’ve never had a boxed mix cake failure yet.
Good for you, but that’s not particularly relevant to what Saint Cad was talking about, i.e., making a cake from scratch.
Making a cake from scratch isn’t super-hard either, but making it well does require a certain amount of knowing what you’re doing.
Anyone who can read, has respect for the recipe and isn’t “as seen on TV” stupid can make a cake that is tasty. What’s hard is:
The top is perfectly smooth, the writing is neat and clear, the piping is even and attractive.
If all you want is cake in a foil 9x13 pan, with the top covered in frosting, most people can do that cheap. If you want a ‘nice’ cake, that is decorated, has writing, and piped flowers or anything else, most people need to pay a pro to do it.
It is not. Stop being obtuse.
Given the choice, I’d much rather bake a cake than change a car’s oil.
I would too, but it’s not a lot harder or much bigger pain in the ass.
Plus it helps if you have a hoist.
Anything that runs the risk of me needing to use gojo to get stains off my hands is automatically more work and a bigger pain in the ass.
You might have to use the GoJo to get the food coloring stains out.
Then what are you arguing about?
I’m talking about the Crestwood bakery that was over on Highway 100 in West Allis. My wifes best friend was the comptrollers executive assistant before she was forced into early retirement. This was the factory that made all the bakery for the Sentry stores. her kids worked in the factory part during summers.
I was only in the place once as outsiders were not normally allowed in the area where food was made. There was 1 person by the frosting machine and 1 by the squiggle goop machine. The rest were by where batter and such were poured into molds and some were on the conveyor belt and packaging machines. How many total I know not. They were cranking out hundreds of cakes an hour.
The store has every right to charge whatever they want, and they should charge as much as they can get. I’m just surprised they actually get $29 for these simplex cakes.
It’s a machine doing it, not a “pro”.