I’m not arguing, I’m simply stating that you’re making things up, or at least not providing data to back up your statements.
I’m not sure who all did what, but Crestwood had 125 employees when they closed.
Do you still want to hold on to your claim of “There are employees in charge of these machines, but not many.”?
[QUOTE=pkbites]
It’s a machine doing it, not a “pro”.
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It’s kind of astonishing that even right after admitting you don’t know how many operators it takes to staff a cake factory, you pop back up with the same blind insistence that a factory-made cake somehow doesn’t have any significant costs other than its basic ingredients.
Because the factory employees and all that complicated equipment, like your wife when she bakes a cake, apparently don’t cost anything at all. (Which makes it all the more mysterious that people are asking thousands of dollars for used industrial bakery equipment on eBay.)
I don’t care who does it. For the vast majority of folks, their $5 cake is going to look like childish crap. Making a nice cake by hand is art, it takes practice. I don’t have time to practice making cakes so that my wife’s birthday cake looks nice, I’d only make 1 a year anyway. It makes sense to buy one for $20 at the bakery, even if it’s made on an assembly line.
Yes. I was kind of astonished at the time that one guys career was standing there while a machine frosted a cake. All he did was push a lever to bring the next cake up. 1 guy ran that machine, that’s it.
Minus executive staff, shipping receiving staff, trucking staff, and cleaning staff, that’s only about 25-30 employees per shift. They were making all kinds of goodies for a couple of chains state wide. That’s not very many people for all the stuff they were making for a lot of locations. If they were making those cakes by hand instead of machine as some of you contend they are, they’d need multitudes more people.
Do you think the executive, cleaning, trucking, and shipping/receiving staffs are working for free?
You still don’t seem to be grasping the concept that even the people who are not actually touching the cakes or touching the machines that are touching the cakes still have to get paid.
You evidently can’t shake your notion that the cost of an individual cake somehow should be limited to the basic ingredients and five minutes’ worth of hourly pay for the guys who supervise the mixing and frosting machines, because “they’re making all kinds of goodies for a couple of chains state wide”.
On the contrary, the more cakes they bake for the more locations they deliver to, the more they need to spend on truck drivers and truck fuel and shipping/receiving staff, not to mention the extra space and machinery and utilities required to produce the additional cakes.
Too bad Jiminy Cricket never did You - and Your Cake.
The amount of ingredients and man power per one of the cakes I’m talking about, is approximately equal to 2 large boxes of Ding Dongs. Same type of machine and technique for making either, just different sizes.
Even at the corner inconvenience store 2 large boxes of Ding dongs aren’t $29.
But once again, this isn’t about what they’re charging . They can charge whatever they want and should charge the most they can get. I’m just surprised enough people would pay it.
And Ding Dongs and similar boxed “snack cakes” all have a standard recipe and a 2-4 week shelf life, and are designed to be bumped around in their sturdy cellophane and cardboard packaging. Your point?
Fragility costs more. Perishability costs more. Variety costs more. You can’t simply approximate a particular baked good by an equal volume of a totally different product and then scratch your head over the difference in their prices.
Why don’t you tell us all the equipment needed, from start to finish needed to go from raw ingredients to packaged and out the door for a 1 layer frosted/piped/written on cake and a ding dong (filled/enrobed/individually wrapped, boxed, palatalized), and see how many of those pieces are the same.
If you’re not doing that, again (for what, the third time now), you’re just making things up.
Also, Hostess is in a totally different league here. From this wiki article, they have (had) 18,500 employees, but the line above it says " The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union (BCTGM), which represents 6,600 Hostess employees"
So I’m guessing those 6600 are the ones working in the factory since drivers would be Teamsters and all the other maintenance (pipefitters, millwrights, electricians, plumbers etc) and white collar people would be other unions.
Regardless, I’m not sure it’s fair to compare a multinational company to a local one, similar products from those two companies will nearly always be cheaper from the bigger company. But, you MUST know that you can’t compare a Ding Dong to a sheet cake.
Anyways, this is GQ, how about a cite for the part I quoted you on.
It’s only fair, I’ve cited every one of my rebuttals to your made up facts.
I worked in a cake factory for a few years, and it took about 30 of us to make 3-5000 cakes in a ten hour shift. Cakes were produced between 6-10 per minute, depending on how complicated they were. We made $9-13 an hour, depending on time on the job, certainly not skill. We sent out cakes to the Kroger family of stores. They were 1/4 or 1/8 sheet cakes, some pretty, some simple slap-dash affairs. The 1/4s sold for about $15. They were flash-frozen, packed four to a box and shipped out to a warehouse. I think they had about a six month shelf life. They would be frozen at the store until they pulled them out. They had quite a healthy shelf life to work with, it’s not like they could only stay for a day before being thrown out. They were still displayed under at least refrigeration, not room temp.
The bakers at the store could write a message on the cake (free) and send the customer on their way. We also competed against the store’s special order cakes. They used the same ingredients we did (frozen, un-frosted cakes) that they decorated to customer specs. The advantage was this cake was not made in a real hurry with a taskmaster snapping the whip, the decorators weren’t burned out and would care a bit more, and they would have to face the ultimate consumer of their product, so presumably wouldn’t present crap. Plus, the cakes did not have to endure freezing, shipping and then store storage, all of which messed the cakes up a bit.
Ultimately the factory gave out and I assume the stores are doing the decorated cakes now.
We did get yearly bonuses, and we lived and died by the price of sugar. It may cost us more to make the cake, but our profits could be cut because the store still didn’t pay more for the product just because the price of sugar spiked. Nor did the customer.
When we saw our cakes for sale in the store, we’d spot some of the quality issues (cake showing through icing, badly formed roses, mashed icing, etc) we’d marvel at how they expected to get $15 for them when they looked as they did.
An interesting side note was that roses had to be pre-made by hand. These were done on an overtime basis by those that could make the larger roses. They were put into cigarette totes and pulled out for application when the cake that used them was made. We dry-iced them so we could pick them up. You could make about 60 an hour, and a cake would take two or three of them. Eventually they decided they didn’t like paying the employees overtime, so they contracted rose making to the AMISH and paid per the rose. No more lollygagging! Funny thing is, we were a USDA plant, but no one inspected the conditions the Amish were producing food in (their own private kitchens where children and pets roamed free). We were always finding cat hair in the Amish roses.
It’s a gotcha item. People who buy birthday cakes at a supermarket are desperate. They forgot to order one at a proper bakery and they don’t have time to bake their own. Little Timmy’s birthday is tonight. Gotcha.
The other thing is that kids aren’t very sophisticated. They’re not going to notice that the supermarket cake isn’t as tasty as the one from the local independent bakery. So why spend the extra money?
This thread has developed into a debate, but I don’t think an argument about cake really qualifies as a “great” one.
Let’s move this over to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
In 2014, award rate for cleaners is around $18 in vic.aus we got about 10% more for working to agreement instead of award: that would make it around $20. 33% over award would be a very good rate! $25 could be a contract rate or a charge out rate, or an overtime rate or for a special job. Not what an employee would be paid just for sweeping the floor.
By your description it sounds like the kind of cake I’m talking about, only yours are half the price.
So do you agree or disagree with me that $29 was pretty expensive for one of these cakes? Not that I think stores shouldn’t be allowed to charge whatever they want.
Yes, I couldn’t see $29 for a 1/4 sheet cake from a grocery store. Maybe from an independent bakery, where one person spent all morning baking the cake fresh, decorating to your specs, etc. But not a grocer where the cakes come four to a box, or the ones that are special order but are limited to the few that are in the catalog. I think $10 would be more reasonable for mass produced sugar and flour.
Our factory was responsible for our own debts and operating expenses, we just had the privilege of supplying to Kroger at the price they decided they would pay. Too bad if we lost money. Even though we were professional bakers and cake decorators, we had no union, even though the teen bagging groceries had one. Creative accounting would be employed to come up a with a reason to take the losses from the employee bonuses.
Without trying to argue over workers/unions/all that crap (it wasn’t a bad place to work, compared to what you could be doing), I say there is a ton of profit to be had on the grocers’ end in these cakes. They’re high because as someone above said, they are a gotcha! item. You need the cake, didn’t plan ahead, and now you’ll pay what they say. Like buying roses and candy in a heart at the Kwiki Mart on Valentines day.
Here is the Target order form. Looks like quarter-sheets are only $18. I think the OP is either talking about a larger i.e. half-sheet cake or something was mispriced or he found the particular store that was using that cake to screw over customers.
Ultimately we still get back to the point that what you are buying is a cake made from scratch which tastes better than the kind out of the box with frosting from scratch that tastes better than the goop out of a can. Yes my cakes taste better because they are not mass produced and frozen and I use butter in my frosting and not shortening but I can’t decorate a cake for crap and so if I want a decorated cake, I need to pay for it. I just don’t get it - if you can make an equivalent cake on your own and decorate it then don’t pay for it but the comparison here of buying a Betty Crocker mix and throwing some canned frosting on it to a professionally-made albeit mass-produced cake is like me railing against how expensive a new Dodge Charger is because look how cheap I can buy a Kia Forte for.
The cake he’s describing sounds closer to a 1/2 sheet, at 12"x15" (by the OP’s estimate.) Still, he seems to say a similar sized double later cake us going for much cheaper there, so I’m curious what that difference is.