Comment by bell-cot
5 days ago
A good generality, but I'll disagree on the bakery/sandwich specifics.
There's a lot of overhead in a sandwich shop hiring a baker, then outfitting a kitchen to efficiently bake bread at scale. And how do you handle his days off, with n=1 baker?
Vs. a bakery only needs 4' of counter space to do a modest volume of basic (cold cuts & such) sandwiches. Unless it's a pretty upscale bakery, the customers will be fine with less-than-fancy sandwiches at less-than-fancy prices - those are mainly a "while I'm here" convenience. Vs. a "great sandwich" shop has to qualify as a destination.
I agree here. I more often see bakeries selling sandwiches that they make in house (although no clue as to the volume/financials of it), but rarely (never?) see sandwich shops doing in-house baking. The independent ones out-source to a bakery and if it's a well known bakery, they will advertise where they get their bread.
> rarely (never?) see sandwich shops doing in-house baking
Subway?
Also Panera.
Though I should point out that this is not baking, but simply putting premade delivered dough into an oven. The dough is baked, yes, but this is not what people mean by baking.
A bakery generally is mixing flour themselves.
From a quick web search - Subway has an often-changing network of contracted suppliers of frozen bread dough.
It's been a while since I ate there, but the bread quality was for-sure not up to "we hired a baker to elevate our sandwiches" standards.
Don't they just heat up frozen/pre-made bread? I don't know...just I don't think they have enough room to be a real bakery. Also, corporate financials would have centralized that a long time ago.
6 replies →
I think you're missing the point. The bakery would have to sell "less-than-fancy" sandwiches, but the sandwich shop could sell sandwiches with bread just as good as the bakery would use.
The bakery has to become a inferior sandwich shop to make sandwiches. The sandwich shop doesn't have to become a bakery to bake just the types of bread that they need to wrap their sandwiches.
The bakery would be better off selling dough to the sandwich shop.
this whole thread is hilarious and yet quite insightful.
Yes, the core idea behind Stack Fallacy was that if you are Apple you don't need to build a better CPU than Intel for all workloads - you just need M3 for your Mac.
So yes - just one type of bread. Like Subway. Or Panera.