"the salaries of pastry makers in the Chicago area do not appear to have budged much, if at all. The key to this puzzle tells us a lot about why the American economy isn’t necessarily behaving the way workers have traditionally assumed. ... Employers, according to those in the industry, have increasingly turned to less experienced workers to ensure the flow of sweets"
The drive to employ cheaper, okay workers in action. Applies to software development as well.
Does a more expensive pastry chef produce more expensive pastry? Or can a more experienced chef produce higher volume also? If the cost of the pastry increases with the cost of the chef, then it's entirely reasonable that there is a lower demand for more expensive pastry and therefore a lower demand for more expensive pastry chefs.
With software development it's a little different - it's entirely possible for a more expensive software developer to produce lower-cost software if the cost savings come from better planning, more fluency with the toolset, and fewer (high-impact) bugs.
Not only that but a cheap, inexperienced dev can create negative value. Not just in the product that they're working on but your entire brand.
Just ask LinkedIn or Yahoo if it was a good idea to put some ignorant fool in charge of the system that stored passwords. Aside: I'm sure that person is worth more now because they won't make such mistakes (again)!
Rant: Looking towards the future I want to know which ignorant fools are in charge of Microsoft's Active Directory product that is currently shipping with the same damned ignorant mistake (no salt). I mean, seriously guys: How can you allow the product to continue with such a blatant disregard for basic security?!
Microsoft is going to be the next LinkedIn if they don't fix it.
This comment made me think of Chipotle. I haven't eaten there since all the food poisoning problems.
Chipotle is a big chain and got national attention for the poisonings, but in the age of Yelp a few people getting sick can tank a small local business.
Better to pay a little more for decent employees that care about their job and also give them benefits so they don't come in sick and spread disease.
> Not only that but a cheap, inexperienced dev can create negative value. Not just in the product that they're working on but your entire brand.
> Just ask LinkedIn or Yahoo if it was a good idea to put some ignorant fool in charge of the system that stored passwords. Aside: I'm sure that person is worth more now because they won't make such mistakes (again)!
Why are you assuming the problems of Yahoo and LinkedIn were caused by cheap, inexperienced developers? From my experience I think the problem was more likely that someone implemented a basic, not-for-production system to scaffold the larger system and was not permitted to change it by management that demanded it be released yesterday.
Ah, but a pastry chef can only disappoint so many customers at once. A single stupid mistake by a software developer can impact millions. The Yahoo leak alone was half a billion users.
What do you mean? I don't believe there was much indication that that cost yahoo anything at all? The stock didn't respond. I doubt many customers left. The page rank has not changed. And there is no indication from previous large breaches that the customer cares or at least thinks anyone else is doing it better.
So what leads you to think that the impact to a business (especially of comparable scale) would cause more financial impact if it was your average dev job vs a chef?
The stock was being held up by Version's offer. They've asked for a discount of 1B, and are considering backing out altogether. The stock will probably respond then.
> "We're looking to Yahoo to demonstrate to us the full impact they believe it's not," Silliman said. If Verizon concludes the breach had a material impact on Yahoo's business, then a key condition of the deal would not be met, he said.
This is true and there are others too. However everyone eats, not everyone gets a zap to the brain. The below link suggests nearly 40 million cases of food poisoning and 3,000 deaths per year in the US alone. Obviously that isn't all from pastry chefs, but it's vastly more than I'd have guessed. https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/
I'd imagine that food-born illnesses are mostly attributed to unclean surfaces at various points in food logistics. From the farm that grows and distributes, say, lettuce to the cutting board and dinnerware used by chefs.
I'd imagine that most restaurants/food distributors employing pastry chefs have other people to do the cleaning. So the likelihood that one could point a proverbial finger at a pastry chef as the source of a food-born illness is probably extremely low.
Interesting statistic. Let's say the 3000 are certainly due to bad chefs. What would be interesting: How many of the 40 million are due to bad chefs? From my own cooking experience I'd say you cannot always say before if some food is bad, so probably "only" a percentage of that 40 million is due to chefs failure, but which percentage ..
I had to call 911 recently, and I was really upset to discover that some idiot had pushed a software update to my phone that replaced the dialer with an "improved" version that changed the way the keypad worked -- in particular, they hid the keypad interface behind a tiny grid icon that I'd never seen before, which made it much harder to figure out how to dial.
If my circumstances had been different, that update could have killed me!
I'm not so sure. I'm the sort of person that quite enjoys going to expensive restaurants and tries to keep up with what's happening in that world. And I've never heard anyone say "don't go to restaurant X, they might have a good wine list and the starters and main courses was great, but their deserts are terrible". At worst they'll say "when you go to X, don't bother ordering deserts".
The truth is that while having a great pastry chef is a really nice perk, for the vast majority of restaurants the quality of the deserts are near the bottom of the list when people priorities which restaurant they want to go to.
In terms of reputation, you may well be correct, but then thinking of the restaurant's bottom line, the generally agreed-upon admonition
, "Don't bother ordering dessert there," is a devastatingly horrible outcome.
Are desserts that big a part of the bottom line? Surely as long you order drinks and a few courses I doubt the restaurant cares too much one way or the other if you then order desert.
the generally agreed-upon admonition , "Don't bother ordering dessert there," is a devastatingly horrible outcome.
Is it? I would say that about many of my favorite places to eat.
With that in mind, my earlier post there, about the devastatingly horrible status of restaurants where desserts become known as bad, well, that's likely inaccurate, I must apologize for being mistaken there! :)
You left out a plausible (and common) option: a more expensive pastry chef can make pastries that sell better.
This is what's in play when you see a line out the door at some shop. The prices may not be that much more expensive, but the quality is that much better.
I can imagine an expensive chef to setup processes that allows cheaper personnel to keep producing quality party. Slowly that process will suffer from time rot (eg: different floor that requires a diff cooking, but cheaper labour can't figure it out), also innovation will suffer.
I see the exact same thing in dev envs, and even more so in ops/sysadmin. Cheaper unskilled labour going through old fashion processes without questioning and never trying to improve.
I was really puzzled for a while, trying to figure out how a different floor could at all effect the cooking (and whether I would want to eat any food from a shop where it does) until I figured out that it was a typo and that it was supposed to spell floUr... :)
"...that allows cheaper personnel to keep producing quality party. Slowly that process will suffer from time rot."
I'm not so sure. I think its binary.
I think there's always a touch, a qwan, assumed knowledge, skill & craft, or something that's not captured in the SOP.
The master baker in the shop next door made the most delicious brioches. Left to start her own catering company. Whereas her trained replacements, using the same recipe, ingredients, and gear, just made adequate dinner rolls.
I spent years perfecting my sunday morning pancakes. Big and fluffy. While best ingredients help, there's still a touch to make them just right. I can't even delegate flipping the pancakes to untrained family members.
I've seen this with other trades too.
You and me, we're too close to our work (tech) to fully understand the value add we bring to our work. But you miss it when it's gone.
Maybe this is why the master / apprentice setup seems to work well for knowledge transfer.
Joel Spolsky spoke about this several years ago, using Jamie Oliver as an example. In a nutshell, as long as everything stays constant, the process can turn out excellent food. The problem is that unless you manage the living hell out of your supply chain, the inputs change all the time and it takes a lot of skil to compensate.
Continuing with your pancake example: the way I make bread in summer is different than in winter. In summer, I expect the dough to rise faster. If it's a really humid or dry day, I'll do things differently. If the flour isn't the same as last time, I can compensate for that, etc...
Process either requires tight feedback to work well, or all variables have to be minimized.
Do you make Sourdough? If yes, I've had success rising it in the fridge - takes longer (1.5-2 days) but conditions in their tend to be fairly constant. As a bonus, you get a ton of oven rise.
I used to have a starter but not now. Never tried a fridge rise, but it does sound like the consistent conditions would make for a consistent rise. I'll have to try that!
50, or 60% of the time, the food I prepare is really good (CMM 1)
A good cook can repeatedly make a really good meal (CMM 2) but not necessarily being able to explain how and why.
A Chef can setup processes and direct any cook to repeatedly prepare really good meal (CMM 4).
A Master will improve existing recipes and invent new ones, will invent new processes to make better meal and make the kitchen work more efficiently etc... CMM 5.
Many other factors help drive demand, e.g. social proof, marketing and branding, newness, location, PR, etc. There are diminishing returns to food quality.
That might be true for a shop, but fancy restaurants have limited upside. If they're filling the seats, more demand doesn't matter that much - it just makes it harder to get a reservation. So above a reasonable level of quality, profit margin will matter more to the business.
right, a higher quality pastry chef produces higher quality pastry and as a consequence of that the higher quality pastry chef should also be the more expensive pastry chef.
I'm noticing that you are asking a question, and then ask another question, put forward a straw man, and then say:
> With software development it's a little different
without having answered any questions with facts nor citing any references or even anecdotes to support the notion that there is a difference in the jobs or the impacts to the businesses in their respective industries.
I'm noticing that they effectively used a series of rhetorical questions to try to make a point. The point is that the curve of worker skill to product cost doesn't have to be the same between a pastry chef and a software developer. That concept is more interesting to me than any references would likely be.
I don't think that truth evaluation should always be the point (at least not initially). More like...a comparison to push into the list for deferred evaluation, as the discussion evolves later in the thread.
If the comment were a stand-alone work, I'd agree, there's no point without framing it as a complete argument with a thesis and supporting statements. However, it's a component of an evolving body of work (the entire comment tree for the story). It can provide an interesting thesis, and it'll either be supported or refuted by other comments.
I'm not sure that your two scenarios are as different as you suggest. An expensive pastry chef may produce fewer pastries (I don't see why it would be more expensive otherwise if the ingredients are the same), but the higher quality may also yield more sales. I can bake you a muffin, but you definitely wouldn't want to pay for it.
For the second scenario, most companies don't need the mythical 10x programmer. The correlation between code quality and profit isn't any clearer to me than the correlation between pastry quality and profit. Most businesses survive on "good enough", and aren't willing to pay a dime more than what's required to meet that threshold.
Surely you see a correlation between pastry quality and profit? I can name a couple of places that I go out my way to visit (and a couple I avoid). Surely most people can? The places I like have queues, sell out of stock and one has opened in a second (more expensive) location. The ones I like charge premium prices.
Also, consistency. Producing high quality baked goods that are consistent is not an easy task. Applies to endeavors like brewing beer too. I think most good artisans are pretty severely undervalued in the US.
Do you really find it hard to believe that a more experienced pastry chef can make better pastries? I think this is the same frustrating myopia that makes people assume they all could easily write software the way you do except in reverse.
The business of pastry sales saturates pretty quickly relative to other products. So "better pastries" can keep on scaling but you can't keep charging more for them. The regional food/dining marketplace can only bear so much, so "better pastries" can't draw from a much larger group of customers.
There's nothing inherent in software that makes it so that can't be the case for software products either. I anticipate the response here is that some products are more complex than others -- true enough, but how many people buy a wedding cake at the grocery store?
My wife and I did in fact buy our wedding cake from the Publix Bakery near the church. We were extremely satisfied with the quality and the much more affordable price. Enough cake for a couple hundred guests for about $400.
To expand my point, we had a really tight wedding budget but still wanted to have friends and family. We had our reception in the Church's Fellowship Hall, not some fancy venue that cost 10x more. My wife and I had to make some hard decisions (harder for her than me, I could have gone much cheaper), but in the end we stuck with the plan. Are more expensive designer cakes worth the money, absolutely! And the pastry chefs who make them are worth their wages. We met with one of the local bakeries that won on Buddy the Cake Boss. But! We didn't have the money. No amount of wishing could make us have the money at the time. We loved our wedding cake from grocery store bakery. It was yummy with good icing and our guests said nice things. Maybe its just because you always say nice things at weddings.
In software, startups can be the same way. Do they need the super scalable, secure, best in breed software? Sure! That'd be great. But sometimes you just have to get out the door now and do improvements later.
My wife and I are just as married as we would be if we had an expensive cake. There are startups in business because they started with what they could afford and then got traction.
I don't find it hard to believe, but if a regular line cook can do the job "good enough", why hire a dedicated pastry chef? If using a bonafide pastry chef makes a real difference, the higher end restaurants will hire them and have a competitive advantage.
I don't know. Perhaps many diners can't tell the difference, or restaurants don't think they can. Perhaps restaurants aren't that interested in desert because it's often a money loser for sit-down restaurants. But you can't tell me no software project has ever operated under similar assumptions (in fact the article says as much, pointing out that there are plenty of places hiring five-figure boot camp grads over more experienced developers).
An experienced worker can work faster at the same level of quality, or at the normal pace or even slower but with a much higher quality, or a combination of these. Not being a domain expert, I can't tell for pastry chefs. (E.g. for sushi chefs, increase of speed seemingly dominates increase of quality, quality as experience grows.)
> Do you really find it hard to believe that a more experienced pastry chef can make better pastries?
That makes sense, but after a certain level of experience, their contribution to quality of pastries will likely reach a plateau and it will only increase further with better ingredients.
The real value of an experienced chef is in the creation and perfection of a recipe. Once that is achieved, a less experienced chef can churn the pastries out indefinitely - assuming they stick to the recipe.
It's not that easy. Ambient temperatures change, humidity levels, flour retains more moisture. Small changes in these things can make huge differences in the finished goods. A skilled baker will read these factors and adjust.
I'm sorry, but what you are thinking of is a baker. A simple baker.
Most folks can make a simple pastry, which is what is more common in homes and such. A lot of folks can make a simple cake. Not everyone can make the puff pastry themselves, get delicate things to come out correctly, and so on. Not everyone can successfully make a 4-tier wedding cake, be able to tell the cake itself has enough structural support, nor can they effectively decorate it - on top of producing the myriad of other desserts needed. Folks take some months getting good at the decorating itself, actually.
Add in there bread and any sort of savory item that might be in a pastry shell as well. Knowing the spices and stuff like that.
"It will not be glorious but it might be edible" : Is this truly enough for you if you are paying for it? Getting married? Would you pay a premium for something simply edible? Yeah... Neither would I.
Additionally, pastry chefs (and other chefs) often have some education in business practices and margin producing sorts of things. Would you have thought of ordering grade b potatoes to mash? How about onions? Could you take some leftover food and make it into some wonderful-tasting special the next day?
The bigger reason chefs have bad salaries is because it is kitchen work. It is a service job. And service pays badly.
From your first line to your last, I can't disagree more or more strongly.
"Edible" is not a sufficient performance by a decent amateur baker, let alone a pastry chef who likely also knows things quite intimately beyond cupcakes like working with sugar and various frostings, fondants, meringues, flans, pies, tarts, cakes, puddings and custards and so on...
When you add that to razor thin profit margins intolerant to waste such that a "recompile" is completely unacceptable then you start to talk about the real aspects of skillful pastry chefs.
Another way to stay below those razor thin profit margins is to hire cheaper chefs.
Nobody is denying that better educated chefs make better pastry. But if 'edible' pastry is good enough for your average customer, then it might be a more profitable strategy to cut down on the labor costs.
Dude. You bought, hooker and sink, some bullshit ad from the local 'artisanal bakery'.
Sorry but there are no 10-generation artisans labouring endlessly to bring you your $5 cupcake. Its just 15-year old kids working to get some money towards college.
It doesn't meet your 10 generation bar (not sure there would be even 4 generations of non Maori baking in New Zealand) but I can name 3 second generation bakeries/kitchens and the staff work very hard and have high standards. The things they make get high prices and they appear to be doing very well. I went to school with 4 of the younger generation and they now mostly run one of the companies.
How many companies need "basic code"? Many need much more than that. Your phrasing makes it seem like advancing beyond that point is just as easy, but it's not.
What happens when you need to debug, and you don't understand anything because you copy-pasted from a tutorial? How long would an employer be willing to wait while you google for the right tutorial telling you how to fix the problem?
Have you ever looked into how many businesses do nothing but set up WordPress sites for customers with light customization? Quite a lot of companies want such services.
"Writing code is not really hard" isn't the same thing. Maybe you can bang together such a site without really coding, as soon as you do, even simple PHP or HTML it gets harder. I'd also take "writing code" to mean writing code, not just a subsection of particularly easy code - you can't advertise as "software developer" in general if all you can do is wordpress.
I am not saying that pastry chefs and baristas are useless.
What I am saying is that, according to industry data, any random person can be trained to the degree of 'pastry chef' of 'barista' with something like several weeks of training.
And that is basically indistinguishable from 'no-skill worker'.
> You can spend 30 minutes watching youtube videos and learn how to write basic code. It won't be glorious but it will work.
Mmmmmmmaybe if you're writing boring CRUD (and any non-YouTube educated engineering would probably think of automating this). Fortunately there are much more interesting problems that can take an entire team of world-class engineers to solve, working gloriously or just barely.
I feel like if it were really that easy there wouldn't be any need for the elaborate system of culinary schools and apprenticeships at restaurants that teach high-level versions of these skills.
I just want to say that there is a misconception here.
'Chef' indeed needs to go to school and may take years to earn the title.
'Pastry chef' is not a 'chef'. There is no culinary school involved, or required to be pastry chef.
Like "software engineer", "chef" is a pretty much unregulated title. You can be hired as a "chef" as a fairly low skilled short order cook, or as a highly skilled, highly trained master of fine fusion cuisine.
And at the top tiers (like people who do $2000 wedding cakes), pastry chefs are definitely highly skilled and highly trained.
>Does a more expensive pastry chef produce more expensive pastry? Or can a more experienced chef produce higher volume also? If the cost of the pastry increases with the cost of the chef, then it's entirely reasonable that there is a lower demand for more expensive pastry and therefore a lower demand for more expensive pastry chefs.
Yeah, god forbid the actual quality of the pastry comes into play, and that the restaurant/bakery/etc takes pride in its output.
Few customers care that much about the quality of a pastry. A marginal decrease in quality won't result in an appreciable decrease in customers; likewise, a better quality pastry probably won't bring in enough money to cover the better chef.
At least in the USA. Here, most people equate "pastry" with something on the level of Dunkin Donuts, and are oblivious to the quality of something like an Austrian "konditorei".
The restaurant/bakery/etc may take pride in its output, but if the customers don't care in kind (a thing is worth what another is willing to pay for it) then it's unsustainable. Diminishing returns matter.
Even bigger profits come from selling crap to people.
Especially if you help build and sustain a whole culture that teaches them to have low expectations from what they buy, lure them with BS ads that tout unsubstantial products to high heavens, etc...
>As an aside, I'd be skeptical of Artists who produce "Inspiring work" which refuse to find any takers.
Don't necessarily disagree (although Apple makes some crap too of course, generally the take pride in their products and try to do the right thing even if it hurts their volume sales or margins).
And they might even prove that putting something good out matters -- like several other companies do.
But the general mode of production in 90% of the industry is not Apple (which always catered to the more expensive "high end" of the market).
It's companies selling half-arsed products or knowingly bad products (like tons of crappy food stuff), even when they have tons of margin available to produce something better.
You have to fight people's acceptance of slightly lower quality if it means slightly lower prices? Maybe we can call it the Global War on Mediocrity? Like other global wars, it will result in a massive increase in mediocrity.
At the era when industrialists took pride in their creations.
E.g. to the point to refuse to put out something that they know is subpar or to sweat the details beyond what the ignorant layman will immediately appreciate -- even if those things means reduced profit margins.
Of course that presupposes companies that listen to people and their vision, not shareholders screaming to maximize value.
The current attitude that its all about the profits is why we can't have nice things...
Problem is price for pastries is more or less elastic.
I'll pay $2 to $4 for a croissant/crescent but I'm not going to pay more than that. An $8 croissant isn't going to be any better because the preparer gets paid more. It may taste marginally better with more expensive ingredients, but not because the chef/baker/baxter is paid more.
I think you're giving away another reason. In general, Americans don't value high quality food. A croissant is a croissant to us. Tyler Cowan wrote an interesting book speculating why. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GSYYQ2/
I think by that logic no one values high quality food? A croissant in Paris is probably about 2 euros as well. If we both agree the French tend to do croissants better, and care about it more, so how come theirs don't cost significantly more?
The parent specifically mentioned Americans. It's much easier to find the right and good ingredients for a recipe in France than is it in the U.S.
Go to any supermarket in France and buy flour for instance: you'll find type T45, T55, T65, T80, T110, T150 [1]. And professional pastry recipes will tell you exactly what type of flour in what quantities. In the U.S. you will only find "All Purpose flour". I know French pasty chef in the U.S. who struggles to find the right ingredients.
Since people care about getting T45 or T65, the producers create them at scale accordingly, and so it's possible to find a specific flour for the same price of "All purpose flour" in the U.S.
This is higly correlated with regulatory laws governing agriculture in US and Europe.
EU has much more strict policies, limits on pesticide use, no GMO rule, plus specific laws to protect traditional (sometimes centuries old) product recipies from being faked by inustrial-scale producers, replacing natural ingredients with chemicals.
That's why food generaly tastes much better in Europe.
Your first comment doesn't square with my (limited) experience with bread. Making bread from wholemeal organic flour versus non organic makes a big difference. You can see, smell and taste it, and if you were nearby I'd bake you two loaves and ask you to rate each. However this isn't a true compassion as the manufacturing processes are sure to be different. My theory is that there is less wild yeast in the nonnorganic flour, but the real reason may differ.
How is natural vanillin any better than synthetic vanillin? Matter is matter. Organic molecules are identical whether a plant produced them or a chemist.
Not the parent, but that's a good example : I cook with vanilla sticks sometimes, and it's just 100x more flavorful: I can leave the vanilla stick "marinate" overnight in my preparation and the flavor will be much different than pouring vanilla extract (real or synthetic). Synthetic vanilla sticks simply do not exist, and I think the impurities and other things in those vanilla sticks contribute to the taste.
Vanilin itself is a good example of the exact same molecules, but for instance I remember on chemistry class discussing banana flavor extract: it tastes "like banana" but it's not actually the same chemical component. Making a cake with that chemical and labeling it banana bread could be done and probably won't taste the same.
Supermarkets may only carry two or three types of flour, all purpose, 110, and "pastry flour" and perhaps some whole grain....
But that's not where most bakers get their flour, most will get it from someone who specializes in delivering baking goods who will have a larger selection.
You're right. I was trying to convey the idea that: If it's easier for the consumers, it's also probably even easier for the professionals.
I think those specialized deliverers are more rare in the U.S., and so the baker either has to pay for more expensive raw ingredients, or use lower quality.
The price comparison is a bit weird there; there are some of the best croissants and baguettes by very small cheap shops in France while you pay a lot more for a nasty piece of 'doughy thing' in Starbucks for something that has the same name. That is incidentally another comparison where this falls flat; when my American friends visit, they insist on Starbucks every day. Not only is the coffee and the food better next door to it, it is far cheaper. Of course that is a matter of taste, but that is not the reason why my friends want to go to Starbucks; they find it familiar. Once I get them to go into a local small family run place, they don't go the rest of the stay to Starbucks however when they come back they seem to have forgotten the small place.
Can't speak for anyone else, but for years now, I tend to seek out more local mom-pop shops over the chains. Don't get me wrong, I eat at the chains too, especially breakfast (more functional meal), and will try to eat more locally at lunch/dinner. I also try to cook at least once a week. The cooking comes in spurts because I live alone.
Perhaps there's more people in Paris that know how to make awesome croissants. Maybe it's considered "fancy" food in the US and marked up accordingly. There's a lot of economic levers to push.
>Perhaps there's more people in Paris that know how to make awesome croissants. Maybe it's considered "fancy" food in the US and marked up accordingly.
True, but I can still make far superior chocolate-chip cookies (an American staple pastry) at home, for cheap, than I've ever had from 90% of stores and bakeries.
Try out the following recipe with the addition of half a lemon's juice, switching out all the sugar for brown sugar. You can either use the full load of chocolate chips, or substitute dark chocolate, or do like I do and half the chocolates so you can enjoy the cookie.
After reading enough American news I can only joke that they are afraid that the ownership of marginally precise scales would automatically summon a police drug raid against them.
They are not uncommon, I have an electronic metric/imperial scale (they are sold in most home appliances shops). I prefer just scooping quantities out over weighing.
In any case lots of times, after you get to know the recipe, you just eyeball the proportions. No need to be super precise in most instances. We're not making alloys.
I have no idea if it's true, but I've heard it said that some types of pastry are very hard/impossible to make in some climates due to humidity. French pastries can be bought uncooked from France and baked after the flight for this reason. May be a gimmick but I worked by a place with French owners that did this. The pastries were excellent.
I don't know if that's true. I've had some pretty awesome pastries in French speaking Africa, made by French trained patissiers. Pastries that rivaled ones made in France. And this was in hot and humid climates.
This is from over two years ago; are artisanal toast shops still a thing? People in New York are no longer standing in an hour-long line to get a cronut.
While I'm from SF, I haven't lived there in several years. From the video, it seems these are just hip cafes (offering artisanal toast), rather than artisanal toast shops. Will have to wait on a current SFer to chime in here.
I agree, but I know the reason I won't pay $8 for a croissant. Because my local grocery store does a good one for $2. Hell, I can get 6 decent ones from Wallmart for less than 5 dollars. Food is a volume game. Perhaps with automation we can make workers more efficient and pay them better but for as it stands currently its a relatively low profit enterprise. Plus you work every weekend and holiday.
The problem is that you're probably representing the prototypical American, who wouldn't know good bread or baked good if it hit them.
Customers don't know the difference, so most places are fine with serving frozen cakes from the local wholesaler. So the labor rates is driven by those costs.
Well, the typical American is the one who is being sold the crescent/croissant so I'm not sure the point you're making.
Good croissants are croissants out from the oven. Ingredients and method can influence quality but an expensive baker is not going to make worth more than 2x.
I mean, a $4 croissant can taste twice as good as a $2 croissant, but an $8 croissant is more about prestige. It's not twice as good as the $4 croissant just because you get a certificate of provenance along with the fake story about the family who made the raw ingredients possible.
An $8 croissant would be an indulgence a $2 or $4 is one one can buy every day without thinking about it.
In the early 90s, Starbucks marketing research showed (internally) inverse relationship between latte and Twinkie consumption. Think coastal vs flyover. More a validation than heuristic.
"Drive" is right. It often seems like even at the cost of getting inferior work-product, many employers have come to believe that cheap labor is a moral principle. If employers would rather hire lower-skilled workers than pay over $35k/year, the pastry chefs should unionize.
I spent most of the last 15 years in Italy, where people care about their food. They care a lot, and will absolutely discriminate between various tomatoes based on where they're grown, different kinds of pasta, and many other things to boot.
In the US, I think we tend to just look at the price and mostly go by that if the product is not clearly awful.
It is changing though: it's possible to get real Italian Parmigiano cheese at the Costco here in Bend, Oregon. Growing up, all I knew of "parmesan cheese" was that green crap that comes in a can, where they were apparently using wood pulp to bulk it up.
EDIT: BTW, this book by Tyler Cowen has some interesting stuff about "why food in the US was so bad": http://amzn.to/2dNxksx
I find higher quality food to be a case of rapidly diminishing returns. When I'm cooking for myself, occasionally I'll take the time to make everything from scratch with fresh ingredients and it will be nicer, but it's only 10-20% nicer (if that can be quantified) for several times more effort.
I think each person values the increase in food quality differently. You could rate the difference between a store-bought packaged croissant and a freshly baked French croissant at 10-20%. I may say that the French one is 95% better, as the a store bought one is inedible for me.
Neither one of us is inherently right or wrong. It's a matter of personal opinion, and even though we try to, it is not really possible to quantify the difference as a percentage in any meaningful way.
I think the discussion here is trying to highlight that many people in the US value better food less than many people in some countries on the old continent. For a given choice, an American will not think that the difference is worth the price (or effort) while a Frenchman or an Italian (I'm trying to use example s from this thread) will not even consider eating the lesser version.
I speak from personal experience. I've spent most of my life in the US and six years ago moved to Europe. My tastes have changed, and whereas before I like American food, now my tastes have shifted and a lot of American food does not taste good to me. Now, when I go to the US, a lot of food is at best flavorless and at worst disgusting. Most glaring examples are breads, cold cuts (a.k.a sandwich meats) and tomatoes.
BTW, this is not universal across all foods. I still find American hamburgers (not fast food) to be better than their European alternatives.
I'm not sure I'd limit it to 10-20%, there are some classes of things that are hugely different... I find that making my own stock/broth is at least twice or three times as good as pre-prepared, and even among pre-prepared there's a huge variation. This becomes much more pronounced when used as a sauce base.
I find some things I don't notice as much difference (cream, butter) as I will others (milk, eggs)... There are other things that are a matter of taste (grain, grass, grass-finished beef). I wish, for that matter, that more labels contained what they were fed especially for milk and eggs, as the difference between brands/containers and locations is huge.
I try to cook at least once a week, and sometimes that means spending a day making broth/stock (mushroom is an absolute fav, but the most expensive where I live). I find that there are just a few things that make a huge difference, and others not as much... others still are a matter of preference. I also find that mouth feel is as personal as anything else in terms of enjoying a particular food.
The idea that the Mafia defraud themselves is quite funny and those endless movies/tv kitchen scenes would be funnier for it, "don't burn the sauce and use the real oil".
Or take steps to demonstrate the difference in quality and value. Do pastry chefs who make more money make demonstrably better pastries? Does every employer need that demonstrably better quality? Will enough people buy the pastry for the resulting price?
"It often seems like even at the cost of getting inferior work-product, many customers have come to believe that cheap pastries are a moral principle."
I think that's the gist of the issue. People want a $5 snack, not a $35 artisanal free-range organic pastry dining experience.
The prices seem a bit low for 2016. A pastry shop I frequent (not really frequently given my family went low-carbish a few years ago) had their eclairs go from $4.50 to $8 in over the past 5-6 years. :S. Granted they also became a lot more famous.
there are dates on the various shots. Haven't noticed price increases since then. The shop is owned by French owners who grow the fruit/veg (sans exotic). Famous in my town.
I have to agree with the user "douche" who also replied to you. Depending on where I've gone and how much of a baking culture the locality had, I've often had very cheap, very good food, especially vegetables and baked goods.
(Actually, I'm constantly frustrated that baked goods, especially bread, in the United States aren't made fresh and sold in bulk. The good life was five fluffy pitas, still warm from the oven, for about $2, shelved alongside sweet croissants and savory burekas selling for roughly $4/lb. By comparison, basically everything in America is just crap, especially when I'm paying for the $35 artisanal free-range organic crap.)
I'm not sure that's the whole picture. For instance, in many European cities, I can get a better quality product for $5 at a corner shop than I can for $35 at some artisanal hipster place here in the States. It's one of the things I love about visiting Berlin; I've never eaten simultaneously so well and so cheaply.
Good point! People -- including people who should really know better, like government economists -- have been sold GDP as the economy's high score. (Think of Il Sorpasso, when Italy's GDP first passed England's.) It was never intended as more than a best guess, and is one of the many temporary measures for WWII that are still with us today...
The big difference is that a software developer can have an impact on software used by millions (sometimes even billions) of users. So it can be cost-effective to have an expensive software developer.
A pastry chef however can only produce so many pastries every day, so for them to get better pay they need to sell the pastry for more. Is the high-quality high-price pastry market big enough for that?
Many software developers write in-house applications for SMEs. These will be used by sometimes dozens or hundreds of people - not millions or billions.
Companies that write software applications that have millions or billions of users generally hire expensive developers.
No it really doesn't. It probably take all of 90 minutes to learn everything there is to know about making the pastries which are on the menu. Pastry-making is glorified robotics (but it's very exacting, baking is rather unforgiving compared to other forms of cooking.) Software development consists of creating a new recipe every day: you are NOT following well-defined steps.
Every time I dip my toes in some creative field that others take seriously, I find way more depth than was apparent from the outside.
I have yet to find a hobby worth doing where I don't consistently think, "Wow, I'm so much better at this than I was last year/month/week." And I keep feeling that way no matter how much time I put into it.
Over hundreds of years, thousands of people have dedicated their lives to pastry making. You are positing that after the first day on the job, every one of them had plateaued and the rest of their career was just drudgery and repetition. I find that highly unlikely.
I'm only just getting into baking, but I've been cooking burgers for about a decade. The ones I made this week were better than most of the ones I've ever made. I learned some new stuff (this time that a thicker piece of cheese doesn't overwhelm if it's had a little more time to soften from the heat).
An anecdote against: I've been making beef fried rice for a little over a decade (but probably less than 500 times total). The best I could do in the first year was probably nearly as good as the best I could do five years in, and five years in was easily as good as any I could do now. It's a very simple dish, but then, that's the argument about these pastries as well.
As another anecdote, after I learned how the professional chefs made fried rice, it completely changed how I made it. For example, using cooled down rice, preferably from the night before.
Also, the need for extreme heat can complete change the taste, something that most homes don't have.
So if I want really good fried rice, I have to go out to get it.
I worked in kitchens for 10 years. It's not that the task of making anything is all that difficult. It's that it takes practice to do able to bake 120 loaves of bread the same way, every night, getting it right the first time.
Wasting ingredients even a fairly small percentage of the time get's really expensive. This is one of those cases where a server with 90% up-time is easy, but 99.999% is really really hard.
What I don't think people get is it's no big deal to fail say 15% of the time at home. But, bakery margins are really tight and they can't afford that kind of failure regularly.
I worked it a fancy bakery for a couple of months when I was 18. The place supplied smaller hotels and an upmarket high-street café.
The finished cakes sell to retailers for about £20. I was just a temp worker, but the chef who supervised me clearly understood where quality ingredients were necessary, and where they could take shortcuts. For example, some recipes called for a branded liqueur to be used, whilst others used a no-name vodka + fruit essence mix.
The quality was miles ahead of anything available from a supermarket or ordinary bakery. I offended my mum by refusing to say her baking was better. (But my parents couldn't have afforded the kinds of places this factory supplied.)
I was surprised by how incapable some of the other low-paid staff were. Simple tasks like "arrange 6 half-strawberries like this in a hexagon on the cake" or "put one dollop of mix into the tray" were regularly messed up.
You get what you pay for. Qualified, hard working people demand a living wage. If you can't pay that you get whatever is left over after every other employer takes his pick.
This is so true. Because labor is not a commodity, some folks forget that the rules of demand and supply work both ways for labor, just as they do for widgets.
One aspect of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that your own lack of ability at a task precludes your ability to judge the difficulty of that task (because you don't know your unknown unknowns.)
This often surfaces in the software world as non-programmer managers asking "how hard could it be?" and assuming software developers are unskilled, interchangeable, replaceable cogs.
I assume they fail to grasp their ineptitude. Frequently doing a good job is not enough. In a professional setting failure has real costs and you are directly paid to minimize those failures.
I didn't say it wasn't difficult - just that someone could be trained in how to do the tasks in a bakery that someone else has already come up with, in 90 minutes. Imagine someone who has no programming experience (0, in any programming language, does not know what a loop or an if statement is) and that you have 90 minutes to train them to join your development team. Come on.
Maybe if they are doing prep work or washing dishes, that's fine.
If you've never made a loaf of bread and don't know the steps, you aren't training them in 90 minutes. The first loaf likely won't even bake - heck, a lot of baked goods take an hour or two. The dough for croissants takes some hours in itself. You might have 15 different sorts of breads you make (admittedly some will use a master dough). And this is assuming these are pre-tested. You might need to make hundreds.
And make other things as well. Even assuming they are all tested, there are a lot of varied skills there. A lot of them have pastry cream, meringue, and different sorts of custards. All on a time schedule.
I'm not saying one can't train the help with tried and true things, but you are completely underestimating the amount of work and thought that goes into it.
I got a lot of push-back for my comments and Googled, completely neutrally, the exact searches "how long does it take to become a baker" (without quotation marks) and "how long does it take to become a software developer" (since the statement I replied to used 'softwere development.')
The former gave me confidence that I could be hired as a baker apprentice tomorrow and learn on the job over a matter of months. The latter gave me confidence that if you hire the staff of a bakery or coffeeshop and want to get them all started as junior software developers, they won't be productive junior software developers after a day, a week, or a month (unless someone happens to already code as a hobby.) They just can't start making contributions.
It's completely incomparable. Plus, I very specifically talked about joining an existing process of manufacturing to someone else's recipes and designs - not developing new ones.
Junior software developers don't do anything that you can train most servers (waiters/waitresses), dishwashers, bakers, bus drivers, pizza delivery people, to start doing after a few hours or a couple of days of training.
I completely stand by my statement that no, software development doesn't happen the same way. It's just different.
You can get someone in as a software tester basically off the street which is comparable to a jr baker. AKA limited part of the process that makes developers more efficient. We also use collage interns to do some development tasks, which might take 6 months of focused training from scratch so 1-2 years training from tester to Jr dev seems about right.
Thus there is a path for someone to be useful their first week with zero training to gradually become a senior developer in less than 10 years.
PS: Just remembered, my dad actually went from cabinetry to developer and his background was a few years of a philosophy degree. Granted, this was ~40 years ago, but the jump is not as hard as you might think.
>The drive to employ cheaper, okay workers in action. Applies to software development as well.
That says "software development" and was the only reason for my comment. There are no "cheaper, okay" non-developers (as in, the 90%+ of the population who does not know how a loop or if statement works in any language) you can train in under a day to do "software development".
It was quite a bit more specific than "IT". There is no recipe or set of steps you can follow (as in, actual steps: 1, 2, 3, 4, and then you... ) to be a "software developer" if you aren't one, and a non-developer can't be hired for any dev role. People (including you) thought my comment was about baking; it's not, it's about software development.
If this isn't clear enough imagine an ad in a general newspaper: "Now hiring junior bakers. We will train you, no baking experience required. $18.50/hour." and imagine another ad "Now hiring junior developers. We will train you, no computer experience required. $18.50/hour."
The average barista in California for Starbucks makes $10/hour and might apply for either job. But the second job ad is ridiculous, it doesn't make any sense at all in a general newspaper and even if it's true, would entail weeks of training at a minimum.
> “It depends on the needs of the website,” said Boris Epstein, co-founder of the tech recruiting firm Binc. “Coding academies and boot camps” — short courses lasting a few weeks to several months — “graduate people who are perfectly fine.” As a result, wages for web developers nationally increased only modestly during the same period, though the rate of increase was most likely higher at more tech-heavy companies, which also frequently offer stock options.
> The example of pastry chefs — a field where the artistic and technical requirements may be even more demanding — is no less striking. Tony Galzin, a former pastry chef at the Chicago restaurant MK, cited ice cream making. It can take months to learn how to achieve the correct proportions of fat, sugar, protein, water and stabilizers, all of which are thrown off by the use of different ingredients.
Please try a bit harder to read the article you're commenting on.
That's a pretty ridiculous statement which pretty much speaks for itself.
Software development is as much robotics as baking. I'd guess that easily 75% of the tasks being performed by programmers in 1999 are fully automated by APIs and frameworks today.
>I'd guess that easily 75% of the tasks being performed by programmers in 1999 are fully automated by APIs and frameworks today.
Not defending this guy, but it's not like we are still making the same product (pastry equivalent) as 1999. We go through the automation and then build on top, right?
I think everyone completely missed my point. You can hire someone (who has no baking skills) away from starbucks and teach them to follow an exact recipe precisely, in a few hours. You can't hire someone with no programming skills (doesn't know what a loop or if statement is) and train them to join your programming team in a few hours or even a few days. It's just not possible, unless they learn miraculously quickly. I think other respondents might have forgotten what it means not to be able to program at all, or what it means to follow a recipe precisely. You can't compare the two.
>Software development is as much robotics as baking
The next time you see a bus (public transportation) suppose that every person on it were committed to joining your bakery as a junior baker, and one at a time you must teach each of them how to follow one particular recipe exactly. You have two hours with each person. How many of them, if they are motivated and attentive, could you train to be able to follow any recipe?
Now repeat the thought experent, a busful of motivated people. If you have two hours to teach them to be junior software developers, how many will you succeed with?
There are no clear steps any non-dev (who does not know what a loop or if statement is) can follow to start developing. You can't use a non-developer as a junior dev, unless they're an incredibly fast learner and willing to put in incredible amounts of training on their own or on your time.
(I am talking about following other people's recipes exactly, not coming up with new ones.)
The drive to employ cheaper, okay workers in action. Applies to software development as well.